The art of publicity: why theatre posters are stealing a trick from the movies

The most recent famous example of this was The Producers’ ad campaign that featured Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane either side of their office door. When the actors left the show, sales declined, never to be equalled, in part because successive casts didn’t have their recognition factor. Another reason was because audiences had come to believe, the production learned via focus groups, that there were only two people in the show.

That’s when the ads started featuring a chorus line, to represent scale. The rationale for not overinvesting in your original leads makes sense – although in the case of The Last Five Years, announced as a limited run, that might not be an issue.

However, the choice to not look like a Broadway musical seems shrewd. Of course, no one should be suckered into seeing a show or musical unawares. Like any product, theatre has to deliver some approximation of what is promised in order to succeed. But hitting different notes – if you’ll excuse the pun – might pique the interest of those not already steeped in theatre.

The poster doesn’t have any of the usual clues to say that the story is told in song, such as a phrase like ‘a musical’ or a sprinkling of musical notes

The Last Five Years posters and ads also deploy tag lines akin to what films often use to encapsulate the experience. Although theatre does this as well at the start of a run, it typically defaults to quotes from the same small pool of critics once reviews are out – or now to social media praise when the critics aren’t so positive.

For The Last Five Years I’ve spotted two slogans: “Nothing hurts as good as love” and “A New York love story told from end to beginning … and beginning to end.” The former could appear for a play, a movie, a book or even be a song lyric, while the latter alludes to the show’s inverted mirrored timelines of the same relationship.

When the agency SpotCo launched campaigns for Rent and Chicago back in the mid-1990s, their success was down to the fact that they didn’t look like theatre advertising, although, 30 years on they too are now part of the visual language of theatre ads. Even with changes in personnel, it was not entirely a surprise to find that the same agency is behind the campaign for The Last Five Years. Will this adoption of film-ad visual tropes prove similarly influential? For the right projects, I suspect it might. Ask me again in five years.

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This week in US theatre

Already a smash at the box office in every possible way, the Kenny Leon-directed Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal opens March 23 for a limited run.

Following productions of Trouble in Mind and Wedding Band, the Alice Childress renaissance continues at Classic Stage Company Off-Broadway, with Wine in the Wilderness opening on March 24. The director is Tony-winning actor LaChanze.

Kip Williams once again directs Sarah Snook in his solo adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, opening March 27 on Broadway.