News of the day. Item TWO:
From
The Grey LadyJune 8, 2004
'Avenue Q' Tony Coup Is Buzz of Broadway
By JESSE McKINLEY
(excerpts)
When "Avenue Q" won the Tony Award for best musical on Sunday night, just how big a surprise was it? Well, even the technicians inside Radio City Music Hall apparently thought that another show, the popular hit "Wicked," was going to win.
In the moments after the announcement that "Avenue Q" had won, two giant video screens inside the hall read, "Best Musical: Wicked."
Embarrassed Tony officials said the mistake was a result of a "technical glitch," but you could hardly blame them for it. For weeks "Wicked" had been considered a prohibitive favorite to win the award, the evening's top prize.
The show, after all, had all the elements of a winner: box office success, respectable reviews, a spring 2005 national tour. Instead, industry analysts found themselves trying to explain how "Avenue Q," a modest musical with singing puppets playing in a small Broadway theater, had pulled off what many in the business were calling one of the biggest upsets in Tony history. (Unfortunately for Tony organizers, if preliminary television ratings are to be believed, very few viewers got in on the drama.)
...
The consensus around Broadway was that the show had run a clever campaign to woo voters, including full-page newspaper advertisements and a pizza party for out-of-town voters. (The Tonys are voted on by 735 theater professionals and journalists nationwide, of whom perhaps 80 to 90 reside outside the New York area.) The producers sent out hundreds of promotional CD's, with a new song, "Rod's Dilemma," written especially for the Tony race, about a puppet voting in an election.
The campaign, which one production member estimated cost about $300,000, also leaned heavily on political imagery: promotional buttons were handed out at the theater, and the box office was decorated to resemble a campaign headquarters.
"We were definitely running behind, so we wanted to remind people that we were a viable choice," said Drew Hodges, the creative director of SpotCo, the advertising company that devised the ads. "And we wanted to keep everything in the tone of the show, which is irreverent and contemporary."
The motto of the "Q" campaign, "Vote Your Heart," seemed to many to be remarkably blunt. The message: vote for the little guy instead of "Wicked," which, with a $14 million budget and weekly sales of more than $1 million had been given, fairly or not, an air of blockbuster invincibility. By comparison "Avenue Q," playing in the 796-seat Golden Theater, generally grosses about $400,000 a week but has a much lower running cost.
...
Other theories and explanations were also being floated, including that perhaps voters had decided "Wicked," with an advance of more than $20 million, did not need the victory as much as "Avenue Q."
The result also seemed to give rest, for the moment at least, to the notion that the road voters and their allies a bloc of approximately 150 votes somehow control the Tony outcome. "Wicked," after all, which starts a tour next March, is expected to be a much bigger earner than "Avenue Q," which is a quirkier (read less mainstream) show and won't hit the road till fall 2005.
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der Brucer (those goosey about NYT registration can PM me for the missing parts)
