At the beginning of December, I breached countless confidences, both personal and professional, in order to bring you “Decoder,” a post which revealed the true meaning of timeworn words and phrases seen so often in entertainment marketing and public relations. I crossed that ethical boundary with great trepidation, believing that I...
The murmuring from Canada was startling, and grew louder. First Toronto Globe and Mail theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruck tweeted about the cognitive dissonance of the Canadian national anthem being sung prior to a performance of the musical American Idiot. Various tweets followed, regarding both surprise at the practice and the evident irony...
I saw a comment on Twitter this morning which reminded me that Alec Baldwin will be delivering the annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy at the Kennedy Center in April. This is not breaking news; it was announced in November, although a just-issued press release has reinforced awareness...
I have opined in the past about the dark arts of theatrical billing, marketing and publicity in such posts as This Blog is Prior to Broadway and Blurb. Now, as the holidays approach, I have decided to give you a special gift. You no longer need to try to parse that brochure, that...
Once upon a time, perhaps 15 or 20 years ago, I read a really fascinating article which posited that the arts would get more coverage in the media if they opened themselves up and provided greater access to the media. It suggested that the arts were working too hard to...
Marketing. Advertising. Community Outreach. Audience engagement. Audience Development. Social Networking. Targeted Pitches. And so on. This litany of phrases are among the buzzwords common to anyone who spends their time focused on attracting audiences to the theatre. They appear in the fire hose spray of blogs and tweets that consume...
Over the past 48 hours, the culture pages in England have been filled with reports which are all variants of the same story: “Walkouts abound at The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Marat/Sade.” I first spotted this on Sunday in The Daily Mail and since then, the BBC, The Guardian and The...
I suspect that, for many working in the arts, the weekday matinee is no man’s land. I’m not suggesting that we don’t operate them, or deal with them, but I do wonder the last time any of you have had occasion to attend one as a member of the audience....
They come, with startling regularity, on Monday and Tuesday each week. “The Grosses.” The Broadway League aggregates and releases the gross sales and attendance for every Broadway show on Monday afternoons (Tuesdays when there’s been a holiday), and a wide range of outlets dutifully report on the biggest hits, the...
