Dance theater

Dance Magazine, March, 2004 by Sylviane Gold

IN THE EARLY 1970s, when Stephen Schwartz's musical Pippin needed a boost at the box office, Bob Fosse made a little TV spot featuring a few catchy bars from the score and sixty seconds of seductive, newly minted choreography for Ben Vereen and two vampy chorus girls. Then as now, producers were tight-fisted and old-fashioned, and it hadn't occurred to them to use television to market their shows. But Fosse's commercial revived Pippin, and the Broadway musical was finally dragged into twentieth-century consumer culture.

Since then, the millions of flag viewers within a train ride of Times Square have seen snippets of dance numbers from milestone shows like A Chores Line and from forgotten shows like Raisin. They've seen Tommy Tune twirling Twiggy in My One and Only and Alan Cumming cavorting with the showgirls of Cabaret; even a non-dance show like Phantom of the Opera includes a smidgen of a ballet scene in its TV advertising. Except for the rare, sold-out, runaway hit--in which case the television budget is saved for the inevitable rainy day--producers now regard television ads as an essential component of their marketing arsenal.

Some shows go the testimonial route, taping enthusiastic patrons in the lobby after a performance. But most give the TV audience what Broadway publicist Adrian Bryan-Brown calls "a free sample." And with dance such an important part of most musicals, it should be no surprise that so many of those samples include it. But what about the ones that don't? Where exactly does the dance element rank in the selling of a musical?

"It varies from show to show," says Nancy Coyne, CEO of the theatrical ad agency Serino Coyne. "There's no cookie-cutter format." And she points out that every musical has a different sales strategy: "We don't really have to sell The Lion King," she says. "The assignment is to let people know that tickets are available. So you're selling availability. On another show, you might be selling a star, or a song."

Interestingly, even though dance is being used elsewhere on television to sell everything from computer equipment to soft drinks, the Broadway commercials that rely mainly on dance are few and far between. "Everybody likes a Broadway chorus line dancing," says Drew Hodges, founder of another theatrical marketing firm, SpotCo. "But no one wants a show to be identified as dance. Some producers are afraid that will scare people." No one keeps track, of course, but Hodges feels that dance is less of a presence in theater commercials than it used to be. "I love dance, and I see a lot of it," he says. "I would be perfectly happy to use it a lot more. But my clients, I think, are less and less sophisticated about what dance can do."

The current commercial for Twyla Tharp's dialogue-free Movin' Out subordinates the production's dance to Billy Joel's music--a departure from the commercial that ran when the show opened. The newer one is dominated by a large image of Michael Cavanaugh singing at fire piano, while around him, in the corners of the screen, are excerpts from the dance numbers.

It's also clear that the advertising for Chicago, created to showcase the talents of Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera and revived in 1996 for Ann Reinking and Bebe Neuwirth, has no interest in promoting its choreography. "It's been marketed more on sex than on dance," says Chicago's publicist, Pete Sanders.

Newspaper ads for Broadway musicals tend to avoid dance images altogether in favor of the kind of brand promotion perfected by the producer Cameron Mackintosh, who gave us the big-eyed waif of Les Miserables and the totemic face mask of Phantom. A visitor from, say, China, gets very little useful information from ads featuring such logos. But when tourists do find their way to a show, chances are they will buy a t-shirt or some other branded souvenir. Besides, says Coyne, given that newspapers group all their theater ads on the same page, the trick is to make your production stand out from the others. "A photo of somebody leaping could be from any show," she says.

SOMEBODY leaping, however, looks great on TV. Even better, she says, is "a lot of people all tap dancing at the same time. That will never cease to amaze most people." Hodges agrees that dance is a natural for television: "It's exciting, it's dynamic, it shows off the sexy girls. And it shoots a tot better than character development."

David Kane makes television commercials for Serino Coyne, and part of his job, tie says, is to distill the work of directors and choreographers into thirty seconds. The music is chosen first, and it's almost always just one song. The other elements are added to create a structure that echoes the show. And Kane has no compunctions about changing things a bit. "It's my responsibility to make it look dramatic for the television audience," he says. Typical commercials for Broadway shows cost between $150,000 and $300,000.

Today's commercials are a far cry from that spare, elegant little dance sequence intended to drum up business for Pippin--which, by the way, closed in 1977 with a minute or so of extra choreography that wasn't there on opening night. Fosse added it after customers complained that the dance they had seen on television wasn't in the show.