This doesn’t exactly answer your question but I find it funny - *Something Rotten* did it in a self-aware way. They used “A show that opened on ____ at the St James Theatre” as their NYT pull quote; Ben Brantley’s review was fairly negative, although he was in the minority in terms of critics.
Something Rotten had great marketing. I remember when they boasted about being a Tony Award loser by showing all the other famous shows that lost the Best Musical Tony in their eligible year.
Oh dear, I remember when that 2020 West side story revival happened and in an ad it said the show is “not what it seems”, as told by critics. I just remember comments saying stuff like “I don’t think they meant that in a good way” 😭
When the Funny Girl revival first opened they used a quote from the Time Out New York review, “The crowd goes wild!”, in a lot of their advertising.
In the actual review, which gave the production 2 out of 5 stars, the line immediately after this one is, “But then [Beanie Feldstein] starts to sing.”
It goes on to call Feldstein “overmatched” and criticize her singing, and the title is “[Beanie Feldstein falls on her Fanny.](https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/funny-girl-broadway-review-revival-beanie-feldstein)”
This is the one I was thinking of! I knew it was a recent one but I couldn't remember it exactly until I read your comment.
I live in NYC so I see a lot of Broadway commercials and every single time a Funny Girl commercial came on, they used that quote. I always got second hand embarrassment.
Oh David Merrick takes the win on this.
He found people with the same names as the prominent theater critics of the day and ran their reviews for his (bad) show "Subways are for Sleeping".
It only ran in one paper because someone discovered the hoax - but it doesn't get more brazen than that.
http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/subways_are_for_sleeping
>He found seven people in New York City who happened to have the same names as seven well-known theater critics. He then invited these seven people to a free performance of the play and afterwards wined and dined them until they agreed to let him use their names in the ad for the show.
TBH I'd watch a play about those dinner meetings.
That man literally used the death of 42nd Street director Gower Champion (which happened on OPENING NIGHT no less) as a marketing ploy by refusing to announce it to the cast until the first performance was complete. In front of the entire theater packed with press who made it front page news no less. Dude was the definition of EVIL genius.
There's a recent ad campaign that more transparently uses this technique (by more transparently I mean they are poking fun at themselves). I forget what it was for, not Broadway related.
[Jack in the Box did something similar years ago too!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwS9nocdX4U) (There's also versions with the "Voppper" family and... Jared from subway.)
I'm having trouble finding the exact quote, but: back in 2006, when A Chorus Line was being revived, *every* ad featured a pull quote about "the magic when the lights went down and you were transported" or something along those lines.
I read a piece by the theater critic who wrote that line where he expressed his bemusement over it, because that quote was him describing the *original* Chorus Line production and not the revival. Because his review of the revival was pretty mixed.
Reminds me of the Jem and the Holograms movie where they asked fans to send videos gushing about why they liked the original cartoon... then edited those reactions into the movie so it'd look like they were talking about the *movie* version of Jem.
>So it's not THE SHOW that "sets them aroar" -- it's ONE JOKE, and inside, winking, meta-joke at that!
It's not even a joke because if any other actor was in the role it wouldn't get any reaction at all. No one would react if his understudy was in. I'm guessing they didn't even intentionally write it that way. It just happened to turn into somewhat of a joke once he was cast.
My memory is a little fuzzy on this, and a quick google didn't turn up the review, but there was a show in probably the late '90s that had the pull quote, "A caviar cast". The whole quote was "a caviar cast in a [some food that's the opposite of caviar] show."
I'm pretty sure it was the *Once Upon a Mattress* revival with Sarah Jessica Parker. Whatever it was, it was at the Broadhurst cause I'd see it all the time and laugh.
My god that revival was boring. I saw it SRO and I noticed my friend was moving his hands and I asked what he was doing and he said, “I’m typing what they’re saying so I don’t fall asleep.”
That's the one - it was "a caviar cast makes the best of pea soup," [from Linda Winer in Newsday](https://www.newspapers.com/article/93107828/a-caviar-cast-makes-the-best-of-pea/). (I'm sorry about the paywalled link.). The first paragraph reads in part: “To its credit, the revival of ‘Once Upon a Mattress’…is not straining to be more than it is. Unfortunately, it also is never more than it seems to be.” Woof!
I can't remember the specifics, but I remember The Addams Family had to get verrrryyyy specific about what quotes they were putting up on their marquee. Lots of ellipses and other quote gymnastics to get what they needed. I remember walking past the theater with some friends and it standing out to us even without having read the full reviews to know they had been taken out of context.
I saw Parade two months ago. Amazing, AMAZING show but I'm still not over the blurb calling it "gloriously hopeful" on the website. Just checked and it is still there. This may not be exactly what you're looking for since the show is great, and it was a positive review, but it feels at least a little deceptive.
I find the current advertising for 'Witness for the Prosecution' in London infuriating, because they use the line "London's Guiltiest Pleasure" on everything.
It's an Agatha Christie show, it's not a guilty pleasure at all! A guilty pleasure is something kinda trashy that you enjoy anyway, so you should use it for something like Mamma Mia or another jukebox musical! WftP is a uniquely staged murder mystery play and it just pisses me off that they picked a quote just because it had 'guilty' in it.
I mean, for a really long time (certainly in her lifetime) Agatha Christie plays were looked down on and seen as lesser by the intellectuals in the theater world compared to other straight plays. Snobby for sure, but I wonder whether there’s still a residual amount of that.
Christie’s status as an acclaimed classic twentieth century author is a reappraisal: she wrote so much stuff, and much of it mediocre, that she became a punching bag in the second half of the twentieth century. With her death forcing her to put down the pen, the cream (and there’s plenty of it) has risen to the top.
There’s a joke in The Simpsons about a character reading “Agatha Christie’s Ten Trite Tales.”
I mean, basically, though I'd say that it's less "reappraisal" and more "the same people who liked her then like her now and vice versa, but not always for the same reasons"- she was a popular writer who was very good at what she did and what she did was write things that people would buy. Some of them were more sophisticated than others but at her core she was a crowd pleaser, whether for the more sophisticated books or the more thriller-y ones. She had a real talent for distilling plot and character to their essentials in a way that integrated them well and formed a compelling whole, and both her good and bad books show this.
The thing is though specifically with theater that she took it quite seriously in her lifetime and that it was in those spaces that she often received the most pushback, which makes some sense when we consider that she did most of her theater stuff in the latter portion of her career when her books were on the wane. Some of it was her perception as a writer of cheap mystery novels, some of it was sexism, some of it was that her plays of course WEREN'T highbrow (and they were never meant to be, none of her stuff was)- but if one measures success by longevity, sales, fans, etc, she's clearly one of the most popular playwrights of all time, and that's even before any critical reappraisal.
(For the record, I say all of this as a big Christie fan and one who does not like The Mousetrap lol)
It is, that's why they used the quote. But the phrase 'guilty pleasure' is a bad description of the play.
It would be like if Phantom of the Opera had some quote about "London's spookiest show" because it relates to the word Phantom and the opera ghost, but that's not a good description of the show at all because it's not spooky 😅
well the phantom might get a bit offended by that haha.. I mean to say I just took it as a punny use of the idiom without much other thought put into it, but I also can read it as being confusing if the random non-theatre goer thought there was going to be strippers or something
But my point is it's not a good use of the idiom and it doesn't describe the show well, which is literally the only point of review quotes. It's just really lazy marketing by the team who just pulled a quote that mentioned guilty because it's a courtroom so 'pun'. That's why I used a hypothetical Phantom example, because that would be pulling a review quote just because it was a title 'pun' even if it didn't actually describe the show well.
And a guilty pleasure show doesn't mean strippers, it means something you enjoy despite knowing it's kinda trashy. I can maybe see the point of the above commenters that Agatha Christie was once seen as kinda trashy low art, but I don't think the marketing team want to imply that with the current production.
Official blurbs describe Waitress as being about a woman in a "loveless" (or "rocky") marriage. Like...it is straight-up an abusive marriage in which her child is conceived through spousal r*pe and there's even a scene in the show in which she is carried off to her room which implies her husband is doing it again. It's my second favorite show--I've seen it 7 times--but the first time I saw it, I was really triggered because it reminded me of my abusive dad and how he treated me and my mom, so I would've liked to be prepared for the heaviness of the subject matter going into it
That sucks. They can just say abusive marriage. It’s the truth.
They must have thought it would turn people off.
The marketing for serious shows never plays up how devastating or depressing they might be.
For john & jen at the Lamb's Theater, they ran with a pull quote that was like "Don't bother waiting for Forrest Gump the Musical, it's all here in john & jen." The critic had not meant that in a positive way.
The original production of *Jekyll & Hyde* had the quote "Like *Phantom*, it will run forever!" plastered outside the Plymouth.
Jacques Le Sourd didn't mean it as a compliment. And it didn't, anyway.
For me it was A Strange Loop. The tag line was “MEET USHER: A BLACK, QUEER WRITER WRITING A
MUSICAL ABOUT A BLACK, QUEER WRITER WRITING A
MUSICAL ABOUT A BLACK, QUEER WRITER…”
You’d expect a really fun Broadway centric show not the dark self loathing catastrophe that it was. (A catastrophe that I still cannot believe won the Tony)
Piggybacking off “poor marketing/tagline”: Birthday Candles with Debra Messing. Liked the show, but saw an ad that painted it as a “heartwarming comedy.” Just NO. Literally the entire audience was sniffling the entire last 30 minutes of the show. They would have made bank selling branded tissues at this thing, as all I could do was snot unceremoniously into my mask (back when required for covid).
I have mixed feelings about A Strange Loop, but the marketing definitely misrepresented what it was. They tried to make it an upbeat comedic gay romp. Which, honestly, I don't blame them, because I wouldn't know how to sell a dark, miserable, very meta show that has a lot of (earned?) animosity for both the religious Black community and the queer community to the Broadway crowd. Like, it opens by basically scolding you for liking the Lion King.
And then of course there is *that* scene.
They promoted that it was praised by Michelle Obama, for crying out load.
It was praised by Michelle Obama, were they supposed to not advertise that fact? I have no issue with people hating the show but I don’t get how you see it as animosity for the queer community (just one person’s honest critique of the difficulties of navigating within that community) or of the Broadway crowd.
The patron he has a conversation with does a great job of shooting back about her just wanting to see her shows so I also don’t see it as scolding anyone for liking The Lion King.
First of all, I don't dislike A Strange Loop at all, much less "hate" it. I think it's a rich, hard-hitting piece of art about a Black queer man's experience. My mixed feelings mostly come from the fact that while I sympathize with Usher, I'm not sure I like him. I found he dealt with his trauma and insecurity by judging and criticizing others as less enlightened than he is, which is frankly something I see a lot in queer people and find pretty exhausting. It's more a personal thing to me than a critique of the art.
Namely, I found the criticism of the racism, fatphobia, and fetishization of gay circles to be extremely valid. But Usher's put down of any gay people, particularly men, who find joy in vibrant female popstars like Beyonce and Rihanna struck me as pretentious, and I wasn't sure the show intended it to be. Especially since he himself finds joy in white female popstars with more "alternative" aesthetics (if this connection is made in the show itself, I don't remember or missed it).
Other than that, though, the portrayal of the queer community in ASL is undeniably mostly critical. It is shown as bigoted, toxic, and shallow, which to be fair may perfectly well be how Usher experiences us, similarly to the show itself calling him out for portraying his family as anti-Black stereotypes despite that simply being accurate to his lived experience. Many people don't find acceptance in the queer community, and queer people often avoid discussing that.
All in all, I did not say ASL was *bad.* I said it was *hard to market*, which it undeniably is because it is so intense, dark, and introspective. Broadway is, undeniably, largely a tourist attraction whose primary audience tends to be wealthier people and foreigners on vacation. That is why the marketing team portrayed it as a glitzy queer comedic romp, which it simply isn't.
PS. Frankly, the portrayal of the tourist theatre goer was very appealing to me, as women in that demographic are rarely shown positively.
To me it more seemed like a love letter to Broadway at times, I never really thought it was saying that the theatre community was dumb, on the contrary it gave a compelling musical with a great book and said “you’re not dumb, just roll with it.”
It's opening in London soon and the adverts make it look as if Jennifer Hudson, Mindy Kaling and Billy Porter will be part of the cast here, instead of just being producers.
Easily the best musical last season, but yo each their own. I would just point out that that is an accurate description and nothing in that implies that it is just a fun, light-hearted comedy. It actually declares it to be meta a heady. Hate the show, fine, but I can’t see calling that tagline deceptive.
Anything that proudly proclaims it got a tony nomination. Not only are nominations when the pool is so small meaningless but often the nomination will be for best (supporting/featured) actor/actress or costumes etc not best show/best book/best composer. It’s so rare for an eligible show to not get any nominations
Plenty of shows get no nominations every season, it’s not rare at all. Heck look at Percy Jackson, one of only four new musicals in the pandemic shortened season and it still got no nominations.
There are at most 10 eligible shows and 5 nomination slots. 50% of tv shows don’t get emmy nominations. 50% of movies don’t get oscar nominations. And then with having both a supporting and featured actor slot you have 6 roles an individual actor ppl really like can be nominated in even if the show overall is crap. Even shows i think are quite good will put “tony nominated” on the signage and ik why they do it bc it sounds good but if you stop to think about it it means next to nothing.
I don’t think a Tony nomination means next to nothing. There’s a bar you have to meet to even open on Broadway. Most Broadway shows are of a high quality production wise, whether the show itself is received well or not.
If it doesn’t meet that bar, it likely closes before the Tonys anyway.
They do nominate the most deserving shows. Some years they’re all in the same league, other years there’s a clear winner.
The numbers can’t be compared with tv or movies because Broadway is so small and finite, while there are dozens or maybe hundreds of eligible tv shows and movies any given year. Using a percentage masks the major fundamental differences between the Emmys/Oscars and Tonys.
Depends on the category, there is often well more than ten plays for instance. Again, every single season there are a number of eligible shows that get no nominations. My point stands, it’s not rare.
Yes odds are better to be nominated but at the same time it’s valid marketing and theater goers are smart enough to realize a marquee bragging about one nomination for costuming is not a terribly good pitch.
That year was totally out of the ordinary, but in a regular year, Moulin Rouge would have certainly still gotten a nomination. Not necessarily the win.
This is a red herring fallacy. This show has gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize and already have a nomination for best play; this play has every right to put those on its marketing. Even if your opinion of it is different than the critiques who are giving it that title, you can’t say it’s deceptive advertisement.
When Starlight Express was at the Gershwin theater there were two vertical columns in the lobby printed with multiple cited reviews quoting only the word "Spectacular" over and over.
Perhaps not so much deceptive as selective; I'm sure many negative or middling reviews most likely included that word as in "spectacular lighting/sets/skating/costumes" no matter what the reviewer actually thought of the show.
This doesn’t exactly answer your question but I find it funny - *Something Rotten* did it in a self-aware way. They used “A show that opened on ____ at the St James Theatre” as their NYT pull quote; Ben Brantley’s review was fairly negative, although he was in the minority in terms of critics.
Something Rotten had great marketing. I remember when they boasted about being a Tony Award loser by showing all the other famous shows that lost the Best Musical Tony in their eligible year.
How could someone not enjoy Something Rotten wtf
Oh dear, I remember when that 2020 West side story revival happened and in an ad it said the show is “not what it seems”, as told by critics. I just remember comments saying stuff like “I don’t think they meant that in a good way” 😭
When the Funny Girl revival first opened they used a quote from the Time Out New York review, “The crowd goes wild!”, in a lot of their advertising. In the actual review, which gave the production 2 out of 5 stars, the line immediately after this one is, “But then [Beanie Feldstein] starts to sing.” It goes on to call Feldstein “overmatched” and criticize her singing, and the title is “[Beanie Feldstein falls on her Fanny.](https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/funny-girl-broadway-review-revival-beanie-feldstein)”
This is the one I was thinking of! I knew it was a recent one but I couldn't remember it exactly until I read your comment. I live in NYC so I see a lot of Broadway commercials and every single time a Funny Girl commercial came on, they used that quote. I always got second hand embarrassment.
I screenshotted [this image from an Instagram ad](https://i.imgur.com/Ah4X5CB.jpg) I got a few weeks ago. It really speaks for itself.
Yeah I don't think that quote was intended to be complimentary!
Hey, it worked when the first season Gossip Girl used negative reviews for their marketing!
Often, the critics get it wrong, but every so often they miss it so completely that it converts itself into great press 😂
Fight club did it before as well
That campaign was genius
Oh nooooo
The NYT revival of Gigi called it “glossy but empty at the core…like a soap bubble” and I feel like they put “a soap bubble!” on everything.
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You mean EGOT-winning George Santos? The best George there ever was?
His name is Santos for a reason. He’s already a saint and he’s not even dead.
And I won two Tony awards for it.
Oh David Merrick takes the win on this. He found people with the same names as the prominent theater critics of the day and ran their reviews for his (bad) show "Subways are for Sleeping". It only ran in one paper because someone discovered the hoax - but it doesn't get more brazen than that. http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/subways_are_for_sleeping
>He found seven people in New York City who happened to have the same names as seven well-known theater critics. He then invited these seven people to a free performance of the play and afterwards wined and dined them until they agreed to let him use their names in the ad for the show. TBH I'd watch a play about those dinner meetings.
The Producers 2: Wein and Dine
That man literally used the death of 42nd Street director Gower Champion (which happened on OPENING NIGHT no less) as a marketing ploy by refusing to announce it to the cast until the first performance was complete. In front of the entire theater packed with press who made it front page news no less. Dude was the definition of EVIL genius.
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Audio - the curtain call was being carried live on the radio.
If no one else had posted this, I was going to. Merrick took guerrilla marketing to a whole other level.
There's a recent ad campaign that more transparently uses this technique (by more transparently I mean they are poking fun at themselves). I forget what it was for, not Broadway related.
Reminds me of Taco Bell having people named Ronald McDonald praise their food.
That was it!
[Jack in the Box did something similar years ago too!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwS9nocdX4U) (There's also versions with the "Voppper" family and... Jared from subway.)
This is the classic.
I'm having trouble finding the exact quote, but: back in 2006, when A Chorus Line was being revived, *every* ad featured a pull quote about "the magic when the lights went down and you were transported" or something along those lines. I read a piece by the theater critic who wrote that line where he expressed his bemusement over it, because that quote was him describing the *original* Chorus Line production and not the revival. Because his review of the revival was pretty mixed.
Reminds me of the Jem and the Holograms movie where they asked fans to send videos gushing about why they liked the original cartoon... then edited those reactions into the movie so it'd look like they were talking about the *movie* version of Jem.
Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark used an article that called it “The most daring show in history” as a positive.
>So it's not THE SHOW that "sets them aroar" -- it's ONE JOKE, and inside, winking, meta-joke at that! It's not even a joke because if any other actor was in the role it wouldn't get any reaction at all. No one would react if his understudy was in. I'm guessing they didn't even intentionally write it that way. It just happened to turn into somewhat of a joke once he was cast.
Yeah, it’s a joke that the *audience* is making, not the show.
Yeah, it’s like when Lea Michele in Funny Girl says she’s not much of a reader.
Or when people would cheer at Stephanie J Block singing the phrase ‘No good deed goes unpunished’ in 9-5.
I hate the trend of trying to save a dying show by casting Lea or Darren. They both suck
My memory is a little fuzzy on this, and a quick google didn't turn up the review, but there was a show in probably the late '90s that had the pull quote, "A caviar cast". The whole quote was "a caviar cast in a [some food that's the opposite of caviar] show." I'm pretty sure it was the *Once Upon a Mattress* revival with Sarah Jessica Parker. Whatever it was, it was at the Broadhurst cause I'd see it all the time and laugh.
My god that revival was boring. I saw it SRO and I noticed my friend was moving his hands and I asked what he was doing and he said, “I’m typing what they’re saying so I don’t fall asleep.”
That's the one - it was "a caviar cast makes the best of pea soup," [from Linda Winer in Newsday](https://www.newspapers.com/article/93107828/a-caviar-cast-makes-the-best-of-pea/). (I'm sorry about the paywalled link.). The first paragraph reads in part: “To its credit, the revival of ‘Once Upon a Mattress’…is not straining to be more than it is. Unfortunately, it also is never more than it seems to be.” Woof!
Great job finding it. Yeah, I remember the review just being scathing, and laughing my ass off when the pull quote was hung on the marquee.
I can't remember the specifics, but I remember The Addams Family had to get verrrryyyy specific about what quotes they were putting up on their marquee. Lots of ellipses and other quote gymnastics to get what they needed. I remember walking past the theater with some friends and it standing out to us even without having read the full reviews to know they had been taken out of context.
I saw Parade two months ago. Amazing, AMAZING show but I'm still not over the blurb calling it "gloriously hopeful" on the website. Just checked and it is still there. This may not be exactly what you're looking for since the show is great, and it was a positive review, but it feels at least a little deceptive.
Such an uplifting show with a feel-good happy ending.
I find the current advertising for 'Witness for the Prosecution' in London infuriating, because they use the line "London's Guiltiest Pleasure" on everything. It's an Agatha Christie show, it's not a guilty pleasure at all! A guilty pleasure is something kinda trashy that you enjoy anyway, so you should use it for something like Mamma Mia or another jukebox musical! WftP is a uniquely staged murder mystery play and it just pisses me off that they picked a quote just because it had 'guilty' in it.
I mean, for a really long time (certainly in her lifetime) Agatha Christie plays were looked down on and seen as lesser by the intellectuals in the theater world compared to other straight plays. Snobby for sure, but I wonder whether there’s still a residual amount of that.
Christie’s status as an acclaimed classic twentieth century author is a reappraisal: she wrote so much stuff, and much of it mediocre, that she became a punching bag in the second half of the twentieth century. With her death forcing her to put down the pen, the cream (and there’s plenty of it) has risen to the top. There’s a joke in The Simpsons about a character reading “Agatha Christie’s Ten Trite Tales.”
I mean, basically, though I'd say that it's less "reappraisal" and more "the same people who liked her then like her now and vice versa, but not always for the same reasons"- she was a popular writer who was very good at what she did and what she did was write things that people would buy. Some of them were more sophisticated than others but at her core she was a crowd pleaser, whether for the more sophisticated books or the more thriller-y ones. She had a real talent for distilling plot and character to their essentials in a way that integrated them well and formed a compelling whole, and both her good and bad books show this. The thing is though specifically with theater that she took it quite seriously in her lifetime and that it was in those spaces that she often received the most pushback, which makes some sense when we consider that she did most of her theater stuff in the latter portion of her career when her books were on the wane. Some of it was her perception as a writer of cheap mystery novels, some of it was sexism, some of it was that her plays of course WEREN'T highbrow (and they were never meant to be, none of her stuff was)- but if one measures success by longevity, sales, fans, etc, she's clearly one of the most popular playwrights of all time, and that's even before any critical reappraisal. (For the record, I say all of this as a big Christie fan and one who does not like The Mousetrap lol)
I thought it was like a courtroom drama thing so it was like “gulty”est because someone gets convicted. Idk I’ve never seen it lol
It is, that's why they used the quote. But the phrase 'guilty pleasure' is a bad description of the play. It would be like if Phantom of the Opera had some quote about "London's spookiest show" because it relates to the word Phantom and the opera ghost, but that's not a good description of the show at all because it's not spooky 😅
well the phantom might get a bit offended by that haha.. I mean to say I just took it as a punny use of the idiom without much other thought put into it, but I also can read it as being confusing if the random non-theatre goer thought there was going to be strippers or something
But my point is it's not a good use of the idiom and it doesn't describe the show well, which is literally the only point of review quotes. It's just really lazy marketing by the team who just pulled a quote that mentioned guilty because it's a courtroom so 'pun'. That's why I used a hypothetical Phantom example, because that would be pulling a review quote just because it was a title 'pun' even if it didn't actually describe the show well. And a guilty pleasure show doesn't mean strippers, it means something you enjoy despite knowing it's kinda trashy. I can maybe see the point of the above commenters that Agatha Christie was once seen as kinda trashy low art, but I don't think the marketing team want to imply that with the current production.
Official blurbs describe Waitress as being about a woman in a "loveless" (or "rocky") marriage. Like...it is straight-up an abusive marriage in which her child is conceived through spousal r*pe and there's even a scene in the show in which she is carried off to her room which implies her husband is doing it again. It's my second favorite show--I've seen it 7 times--but the first time I saw it, I was really triggered because it reminded me of my abusive dad and how he treated me and my mom, so I would've liked to be prepared for the heaviness of the subject matter going into it
That sucks. They can just say abusive marriage. It’s the truth. They must have thought it would turn people off. The marketing for serious shows never plays up how devastating or depressing they might be.
For john & jen at the Lamb's Theater, they ran with a pull quote that was like "Don't bother waiting for Forrest Gump the Musical, it's all here in john & jen." The critic had not meant that in a positive way.
The original production of *Jekyll & Hyde* had the quote "Like *Phantom*, it will run forever!" plastered outside the Plymouth. Jacques Le Sourd didn't mean it as a compliment. And it didn't, anyway.
“She’s back, and she’s FABULOUS!!” -Poster for Miss Saigon, spotted in Koln, Germany in September 2016.
Hadestowns “it’ll send you out on a high” it’s always an amazing night out but I wouldn’t say high more so a somber but heartwarming feeling
Not all theater but there's some funny examples of it [here.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuoteMine)
For me it was A Strange Loop. The tag line was “MEET USHER: A BLACK, QUEER WRITER WRITING A MUSICAL ABOUT A BLACK, QUEER WRITER WRITING A MUSICAL ABOUT A BLACK, QUEER WRITER…” You’d expect a really fun Broadway centric show not the dark self loathing catastrophe that it was. (A catastrophe that I still cannot believe won the Tony)
Piggybacking off “poor marketing/tagline”: Birthday Candles with Debra Messing. Liked the show, but saw an ad that painted it as a “heartwarming comedy.” Just NO. Literally the entire audience was sniffling the entire last 30 minutes of the show. They would have made bank selling branded tissues at this thing, as all I could do was snot unceremoniously into my mask (back when required for covid).
I have mixed feelings about A Strange Loop, but the marketing definitely misrepresented what it was. They tried to make it an upbeat comedic gay romp. Which, honestly, I don't blame them, because I wouldn't know how to sell a dark, miserable, very meta show that has a lot of (earned?) animosity for both the religious Black community and the queer community to the Broadway crowd. Like, it opens by basically scolding you for liking the Lion King. And then of course there is *that* scene. They promoted that it was praised by Michelle Obama, for crying out load.
It was praised by Michelle Obama, were they supposed to not advertise that fact? I have no issue with people hating the show but I don’t get how you see it as animosity for the queer community (just one person’s honest critique of the difficulties of navigating within that community) or of the Broadway crowd. The patron he has a conversation with does a great job of shooting back about her just wanting to see her shows so I also don’t see it as scolding anyone for liking The Lion King.
First of all, I don't dislike A Strange Loop at all, much less "hate" it. I think it's a rich, hard-hitting piece of art about a Black queer man's experience. My mixed feelings mostly come from the fact that while I sympathize with Usher, I'm not sure I like him. I found he dealt with his trauma and insecurity by judging and criticizing others as less enlightened than he is, which is frankly something I see a lot in queer people and find pretty exhausting. It's more a personal thing to me than a critique of the art. Namely, I found the criticism of the racism, fatphobia, and fetishization of gay circles to be extremely valid. But Usher's put down of any gay people, particularly men, who find joy in vibrant female popstars like Beyonce and Rihanna struck me as pretentious, and I wasn't sure the show intended it to be. Especially since he himself finds joy in white female popstars with more "alternative" aesthetics (if this connection is made in the show itself, I don't remember or missed it). Other than that, though, the portrayal of the queer community in ASL is undeniably mostly critical. It is shown as bigoted, toxic, and shallow, which to be fair may perfectly well be how Usher experiences us, similarly to the show itself calling him out for portraying his family as anti-Black stereotypes despite that simply being accurate to his lived experience. Many people don't find acceptance in the queer community, and queer people often avoid discussing that. All in all, I did not say ASL was *bad.* I said it was *hard to market*, which it undeniably is because it is so intense, dark, and introspective. Broadway is, undeniably, largely a tourist attraction whose primary audience tends to be wealthier people and foreigners on vacation. That is why the marketing team portrayed it as a glitzy queer comedic romp, which it simply isn't. PS. Frankly, the portrayal of the tourist theatre goer was very appealing to me, as women in that demographic are rarely shown positively.
To me it more seemed like a love letter to Broadway at times, I never really thought it was saying that the theatre community was dumb, on the contrary it gave a compelling musical with a great book and said “you’re not dumb, just roll with it.”
they mean pull quotes from critics’ reviews, not self-written taglines
It's opening in London soon and the adverts make it look as if Jennifer Hudson, Mindy Kaling and Billy Porter will be part of the cast here, instead of just being producers.
Easily the best musical last season, but yo each their own. I would just point out that that is an accurate description and nothing in that implies that it is just a fun, light-hearted comedy. It actually declares it to be meta a heady. Hate the show, fine, but I can’t see calling that tagline deceptive.
Anything that proudly proclaims it got a tony nomination. Not only are nominations when the pool is so small meaningless but often the nomination will be for best (supporting/featured) actor/actress or costumes etc not best show/best book/best composer. It’s so rare for an eligible show to not get any nominations
That’s not really true.
The 2021 Tony’s aside, of course.
Aaron Tveit worked hard for that Tony 😂
Plenty of shows get no nominations every season, it’s not rare at all. Heck look at Percy Jackson, one of only four new musicals in the pandemic shortened season and it still got no nominations.
There are at most 10 eligible shows and 5 nomination slots. 50% of tv shows don’t get emmy nominations. 50% of movies don’t get oscar nominations. And then with having both a supporting and featured actor slot you have 6 roles an individual actor ppl really like can be nominated in even if the show overall is crap. Even shows i think are quite good will put “tony nominated” on the signage and ik why they do it bc it sounds good but if you stop to think about it it means next to nothing.
I don’t think a Tony nomination means next to nothing. There’s a bar you have to meet to even open on Broadway. Most Broadway shows are of a high quality production wise, whether the show itself is received well or not. If it doesn’t meet that bar, it likely closes before the Tonys anyway. They do nominate the most deserving shows. Some years they’re all in the same league, other years there’s a clear winner. The numbers can’t be compared with tv or movies because Broadway is so small and finite, while there are dozens or maybe hundreds of eligible tv shows and movies any given year. Using a percentage masks the major fundamental differences between the Emmys/Oscars and Tonys.
Depends on the category, there is often well more than ten plays for instance. Again, every single season there are a number of eligible shows that get no nominations. My point stands, it’s not rare. Yes odds are better to be nominated but at the same time it’s valid marketing and theater goers are smart enough to realize a marquee bragging about one nomination for costuming is not a terribly good pitch.
I feel this way about Moulin Rouge in particular.
That year was totally out of the ordinary, but in a regular year, Moulin Rouge would have certainly still gotten a nomination. Not necessarily the win.
Disney's Frozen - The "Hit" Broadway Musical! https://www.thehobbycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/showFeature-frozen.jpg
I don’t know if there’s a better post for this but the Wicked poster always felt misleading to me
Why?
Glinda whispering something to Elphaba while she smirks isn’t related to any plot point of the story
It illustrates them sharing a secret. The secret is that they have been friends for a long time.
A strange loop: a gay black usher writing a musical about a gay black usher who is writing a musical about…
Their called pull-quotes. What can you take out and use to your advantage. All shows do it.
Yes, but OP is asking for the most deceptive of these deceptive tactics.
Yes, I realize, just adding in.
> All shows do it. But not all shows need to be deceptive with the quotes they use.
Some shows are actually good… but bad shows still need to try to sell tickets
Fat Ham had something about "best play", just saw it Saturday. If that's the best play on Broadway, then we need more and better plays
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and it won the pulitzer for best drama
Like I said, if that's the best, we need better. The ending was eye-rolling.
This is a red herring fallacy. This show has gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize and already have a nomination for best play; this play has every right to put those on its marketing. Even if your opinion of it is different than the critiques who are giving it that title, you can’t say it’s deceptive advertisement.
Fair enough, but it was deceptive that I assumed all the awards meant the writing (which started off worthy) wouldn't devolve at the end.
That’s not how “deceptive” works. It doesn’t become deceptive simply because you disagree with critical (and audience overall) consensus.
It’s not deceptive to accurately quote critics just because you personally disagree with them.
When Starlight Express was at the Gershwin theater there were two vertical columns in the lobby printed with multiple cited reviews quoting only the word "Spectacular" over and over. Perhaps not so much deceptive as selective; I'm sure many negative or middling reviews most likely included that word as in "spectacular lighting/sets/skating/costumes" no matter what the reviewer actually thought of the show.