Raven-Symoné in Sister Act gets a new ad campaign

by Greg Solman

Advertising strategies gearing up for next season take art out the wilderness. CityArts surveys the new media tacticians who bring Broadway shows, museums and other art venues to popular attention. Art and its patrons all benefit from millennial art advertising’s new tactical strategies. Part 1 of a two-part series.

New Yorkers with long memories can’t shake the specter of the TV commercials for the original runs of A Chorus Line and Evita—the same commercial execution, using identical snippets of song for maximum numbing effect, running for what felt like years. The Evita spot became so famously infuriating a fixture it occasioned one of SCTV’s most inspired commercial parodies: Andrea Martin starring in a road show of Indira and—ingeniously intermixing infomercial annoyance—Joe Flaherty as a bandoliered, yodeling Slim Whitman.

Marketing the performing and museum arts today seems like science fiction in comparison. You might be up late watching a WNET symphonic performance when an on-screen icon prompts you to hold up your Shazam-enabled smart phone. The app will sample the sound from the TV, identify the performance and give you the option of downloading the MP3 or ask you a question to win a coupon for a matinee in your neighborhood, having already correlated the cable or satellite box with your ZIP code and assiduously segmented demographic information on your probable age, gender, income, past buying habits and even whether you prefer cats or dogs. Why? Well, maybe dog lovers like Wagner and cat lovers Stravinsky. Who knows? They’ve got their reasons.

Most importantly, the phone will be connected to the sponsoring organization’s seating chart, allowing you to pick a seat for a performance, charge your preloaded credit card and download an electronic ticket you can present at the concert hall by flashing your smart phone at a scanner.

If that interactive/invasive process seems more like something for you than your remote-control-challenged mother, you’re not far off. In fact, the growing generational divide between patrons of the arts and their media consumption habits was the blue-haired elephant queued up for tickets in the living room at the Arts Reach conference at New York University last March. Put bluntly: Can you reach the graying and balding with tweeting and social networking?

Exceptions notwithstanding, there’s no mistaking certain demographic trends. Big-ticket performing arts companies—the symphony orchestras, the chamber music societies, the Broadway belt that needs tourists to shell out $86.28 for the worst seats in the mezzanine—count on a privileged sector of the baby-boom generation and older.

Trends indicate that those might be the last generations who take a daily newspaper. Newspapers’ Internet-edition paywalls are, for most publications that have tried them, useless for converting paid subscribers and generating revenue. Yet, printing is prohibitively expensive and readership is sliding in favor of eyeballs online, where banner ads aren’t making enough money, despite the audience.

Facebook boasts hundreds of millions of users, obsessively checking in several times a day—that’s reach and frequency. But the company’s IPO revealed that although half of Facebookies use mobile devices to access the site, they are devices for which there is no Facebook advertising model…yet.

More than 44 percent of Americans have smart phones, but they skew young. The elderly have gone from the poorest group in America to the wealthiest, with the disposable (literally, some critics would argue) income to pay $262 to watch a play. But arts companies need to refresh their audience with Gens X and Y and millennials to survive as something more than museums of tourism.

“While the traditional media audience has moved on, the rates have increased,” objects Doug Mobray, president of Mogo Arts Marketing in Corte Madera, Calif., pointing to a counterintuitive direction of newspaper ad rates and readers. “The cost per impression has increased substantially.”

The decline of print readership, exaggerated by the generational split between baby boomers and older and nearly newspaper-free youth, is the “first and most obvious change,” says Tom Greenwald, executive creative director at SpotCo, one of New York’s specialized arts marketing agencies.

“It used to be a foregone conclusion that the lion’s share of a media budget would go to The New York Times,” he says. “Now you might advertise there just to please the stars and agents, but the campaign is going to be mostly online banner ads and social networking.”

Greenwald says a lot of live entertainment still targets the 55-year-old woman; though she might not be constantly on Facebook, she’s probably online somewhere, and sites such as broadway.com can gear their initiatives toward that demographic. She may not be tweeting or playing Facebook games, but she will find some online point of purchase.

Greenwald says more than half of Broadway ticket sales happen in online transactions rather than phone sales. “It’s gotten to the point where they don’t even put phone numbers in the ads,” he points out.

Now Greenwald oversees Facebook campaigns that celebrate the 20,000 fans of Chicago with ticket giveaways. Samuel L. Jackson tweets to Twitter followers about The Mountaintop. A “nun” from Sister Act performs a video blog. Most shows, Greenwald says, use a combination of “social networking presence and refreshing websites. The great thing about the Internet is that it is an extension of the show. In the tradition of those Evita TV ads, you can run video content with sound.”

He “roadblocks” (commands all of the display ad space) select sites. Banner ads can be programmed with Flash and HTML to sport animation and sound. Live clips can be constructed from B-roll of the shows themselves, but they can be cinematic and even conceptual. Advertising on TV is now supplemented by so-called earned media—working the morning news shows least likely to be DVRed. “It’s expensive to buy TV,” Greenwald says, “but everyone works it.”

Soliciting the South Park generation for The Book of Mormon means a website with a working doorbell and online campaigns imploring fans to “Like us on Facebook” and “Follow us on Twitter.”

It’s not as if Spotco abjures traditional outdoor advertising or print, but “spending $110,000 on The New York Times won’t pay off,” Greenwald declares.

Clint White, president of New York’s WiT Media and lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, acknowledges the arts audience is “growing older, absolutely. But the good news is that those patrons are converted and believe in chamber music—or theatre or causes or art—and all have made it clear that they’re interested. All we have to do is tell them what’s going on and they’ll sign up. It’s the other [younger] audience that has to be introduced.”

Yesterday I posted my predictions for the winners on Sunday’s 66^th Annual Tony Awards telecast. Below, my feelings about who will and who should go home with the gold in the musical categories:

Best Musical: Nominees include the already-shuttered Leap of Faith, Newsies, Nice Work If You Can Get It, and Once. This is a rather humdrum list. Once is truly a play with music, as End of the Rainbow and Peter and the Starcatcher both identified themselves this season, but it opted to classify itself as a musical, so I’ll play it as it lays. And it lies at the head of the pack here, challenged only by the crowd-pleasing Newsies. Who would have thought that Newsies, based on a bomb Disney movie musical from twenty years ago, would be the Goliath in this race? I still find it a middling musical, and as the more commercial one, would benefit less from a Tony win than Once, which could use the push. I, perhaps foolishly, grant the win to Once, which succeeds better on its own (slightly problematic) terms than the other nominees.

Will win: Once

Should win: Once

Should have been nominated: absolutely nothing else this season

Best Direction of a Musical: Nominees include Jeff Calhoun (Newsies), Kathleen Marshall (Nice Work If You Can Get It), Diane Paulus (The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess), and John Tiffany (Once). Tiffany will likely prevail here, and should: he managed to fuse a lot of unorthodox moving parts to turn Once into The Little Show That Could. Personally, I’d vote for Follies’ Eric Schaeffer over this quartet, but he didn’t make the cut.

Will win: Tiffany

Should win: Tiffany

Should have been nominated: Eric Schaeffer, Follies

Best Leading Actor in a Musical: Nominees include Danny Burstein (Follies), Jeremy Jordan (Newsies), Steve Kazee (Once), Norm Lewis (Porgy), and Ron Raines (Follies). Sometimes I play this game, where I put my money on the actor I want to win less, as karmic insurance that the one I want to win more will prevail. So even though the general consensus has it that long overdue veteran Burstein will win for his definitive portrayal of Buddy, I’ll stick the much-hyped Jordan instead. All the while, I feel that a solid Lewis and especially Kazee are being overlooked in the mix, particularly the latter nominee, whose delicate work headlining this year’s sleeper hit absolutely deserves recognition.

Will win: Jordan

Should win: Burstein or Kazee

Should have been nominated: no one

Best Leading Actress in a Play: Nominees include Jan Maxwell (Follies), Audra McDonald (Porgy), Cristin Milioti (Once), Kelli O’Hara (Nice Work), and Laura Osnes (Bonnie and Clyde). I’m a huge proponent of Maxwell’s work this year; her rendition of “Story of Jessie and Lucy” slew me, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it all year. Also, Milioti’s idiosyncratic blend of tenderness and pluck was a big driving force behind Once’s success – her “The Hill” has also haunted me all season. But this one looks like McDonald’s race to lose, and that rankles me. Though it’s her first award as a leading performer, McDonald will set a record with five acting wins – tying Julie Harris and Angela Lansbury – and I just don’t think her Bess is harrowing or transcendent enough to earn that career milestone (one that took Lansbury an additional four decades to hit, at that). Still she’s a beloved member of the community, and a win seems all but assured.

Will win: McDonald

Should win: Maxwell

Should have been nominated: Bernadette Peters, Follies

Best Featured Actor in a Play: Nominees include Philip Boykin (Porgy), Michael Cerveris (Evita), David Alan Grier (Porgy), Michael McGrath (Nice Work), and Josh Young (Jesus Christ Superstar). Except for McGrath, all of the nominees here are nominated for revivals, and even Nice Work dusts off a bunch of Gershwin standards. I give McGrath the edge over Cerveris, but for me, Boykin stands out the most. His Crown was riveting, memorable and incredibly well-sung. He buoyed Porgy to places it didn’t go when he wasn’t onstage.

Will win: McGrath

Should win: Boykin

Should have been nominated: Patrick Page, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (yes, really)

Best Featured Actress in a Musical: Nominees include Elizabeth A. Davis (Once), Jayne Houdyshell (Follies), Judy Kaye (Nice Work), Jessie Mueller (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Ghost the Musical). Mueller was the bright light in an otherwise execrable misfire, and Houdyshell brought humor and subtlety to a small but memorable part. Still, I said it in my review http://nypress.com/hard-work/, this is Kaye’s to win. Note to those who want a Tony: put a chandelier in your show, too.

Will win: Kaye

Should win: Houdyshell or Mueller

Should have been nominated: Melissa van der Schyff, Bonnie or Bryona Marie Parham or NaTasha Yvette Williams, Porgy

Let’s see how my predictions go!

Evita on Broadway, directed by Michael Grandage. Photo by Richard Termine.

Webber and Rice’s Celebrity Expose

Evita is back–and at the right time, too. Celebrity worship wasn’t like it is now when Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice debuted Evita in 1975 as a concept album featuring Julie Covington of Rock Follies fame. There was no irony–or subservience–in their original idea of exploring the dubious sanctity of Argentine dictator Juan Peron’s fashion-plate wife Eva.  They created Evita as their second exploration into the cult of personality that began with Jesus Christ Superstar.

The music in both productions carries far more verve and melodious emotion than a schematic conceit. Webber and Rice’s modernist approach to legend was only mildly sardonic which explains why both shows have lasted–Superstar still moves the devout as well as the non-religious and Evita even fascinates political skeptics. Incapable of Sondheim’s cynicism, they displayed greater insight into fame than today’s brutishly condemnatory and cravenly obsequious media.

In the current Broadway version directed by Michael Grandage, Ricky Martin portrays Che (Eva’s foil), now understood as a common skeptic rather than a demi-oracle. Che’s failed revolutionary principles (crumbled like Communism after the Berlin Wall) intensifies the spotlight on Eva Peron who now stands as a perfect precursor to the celebrityhood of our time.

Appreciating Evita this way is a testament to Webber and Rice’s great instincts. They didn’t simply predict the celebrity era, they anatomized its origin. The show portrays the same mass hysteria seen at the mourning for Princess Di and Kim Jong Il. That’s why casting Madonna in Alan Parker’s disastrous 1996 movie Evita was not a stroke of genius; it was merely redundant since Madonna had already achieved dictatorial status in the Pop universe. (Her incompetent singing and acting underscored her fakery of Eva’s personality.)

Madonna could not accomplish Webber and Rice coup de theatre “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina,” the non pareil statement of celebrity and showbiz hubris. Understanding that song today, after the myriad examples of female pop icons from Madonna on up to the Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, Buckingham Palace and the White House, reveals Evita’s unsuspected political brilliance.

Che’s early warning “Eva beware your ambition!” comes to roost in “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina,” that Cinderella moment when the lower class climber reaches the peak of Buenos Aires power and shrewdly lords it over the people. The song is breathtakingly moving, devious and (knowingly) hollow–a command for attention that glories in the spectacle of self.

Line by line, Eva appeals to the admiration and envy of the servile throng (“All you can see is the girl you once knew/ Although she’s dressed up to the nines/ At sixes and sevens with you”). She dissolves her difference from them as a matter of happenstance.

Eva’s craftiness is stunning when she downplays fortune and fame as “illusions”–a word easy to coo, that floats on one long breath, smooth as a drug-dealer’s promise. Her admonition “They’re not the solutions they promise to be” is the slickest, clearest demagoguery until Oprah Winfrey came along a decade later. And like Oprah, Eva unctuously bleats “I love you and hope you love me.” There’s no bombast in this great theatrical moment, yet it’s as modest as Princess Diana’s wedding/coronation. Eva’s ballgown and new blonde beehive as she steps onto the balcony for her state address contrast the lullaby’s deceptive low-pressure; it’s the orchestration that surges, swaying along with the mob who are dazzled by the pretense of a public figure seeming to dismiss the power they dream of sharing.

To read the full review at CityArts click here.

Photo courtesy of Richard Termine.

“A backstreet girl” is how Evita describes the ambitious Eva Duarte Peron, the ambitious actress who clawed her way from poverty to celebrity as the wife of Argentine dictator Juan Peron and, ultimately, to either immortality or infamy, based on which side of fence this polarizing figure put you on.

Her legend was considerably abetted a little over 30 years ago when Hal Prince mounted this blockbuster musical, featuring the music of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber (whose music outlining the rise and fall of a different kind of martyr can also be seen across the Main Stem in a revival of Jesus Christ Superstar). Evita took Broadway by storm and became a legend itself. Michael Grandage’s revival, which just opened at the Marquis Theater, is the first Broadway reboot of the tale. Yet in documenting a woman who did plenty of “hustling and fighting, scratching and biting,” this visually arresting staging is nonetheless desperately lacking in bite.

This is partly due to its star, Elena Roger, who first played this role on the West End six years ago, can’t summon up an appetite large enough to convince us of Eva’s quick rise to fame and power. The diminutive Roger, herself of Argentine descent, is better at telegraphing the woman’s more vulnerable moments, particularly in the second act as cancer claims her life at the age of 33. (However, the inclusion of the gorgeous ballad “You Must Love Me,” the Oscar-winning song written for Alan Parker’s 1996 movie version of Evita, feels shoehorned in and fails to express the woman’s self-doubt as it should.) What results is a complex portrait, but not a complete performance. Additionally, she struggles with Rice and Webber’s punishing score, losing many words and straining to hit the high notes of an iconic score that includes “Buenos Aires,” “Rainbow High,” and the signature number, “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” (Grandage’s production more than does justice to this scene, abetted by Neil Austin’s evocative lighting and Christopher Oram’s transformative sets).

Several of the show’s other key performers serve as a stark contrast to Roger in effortless turns. Tony-winner Michael Cerveris underscores what could be a cardboard vision of Juan with dimension, suggesting arrogance and aggression as well as humanity. The show’s music is far more facile for him than his leading lady; he sings the melodies beautifully. Both Max Von Essen (as Augustín Magaldi, one of the rungs on Eva’s social ladder) and Rachel Potter (a showstopper with the gentle “Another Suitcase in Another Hall”) also play minor roles to the max.

The other necessary component of Evita is Che, the passionate Everyman who acts as Greek chorus and jury throughout the show. Ricky Martin fits the bill; he sings and dances with brio and commands the stage, but the performance is too clean. It’s as though the actor, clearly thrilled to have this opportunity, wants to treat his stage time with utter respect. Che needs to be an angry character, and the actor who plays him needs to give a messy performance simmering with rage, one that lights a fire under the show.

That’s the missing ingredient with Grandage’s Evita: there’s no heat. Evita needs to be a show with an edge, as the Perons led a nation into repression and economic ruin, and this production rarely communicates this sense of danger. It’s a neat, removed bio-musical that plays it safe, catering neither to those who deified nor demonized the subject, but to a more neutral audience somewhere in between. Even Rob Ashford’s wonderful choreography, including multiple variations on the tango, feels a bit too careful. Without the proper amount of righteous indignation, this Evita feels as thin as its star’s 98-pound frame.

Evita

Marquis Theater, 1535 Broadway, at 45th Street. http://evitaonbroadway.com/ $75.50.