A Second Chance to Take Off

When the new marketing campaign for the national tour of the Broadway hit “The Full Monty” is unveiled in late January in preparation for an Ahmanson Theatre debut in April, David Yazbek, who composed the show, has some definite ideas about what he does not want it to say.

“I’ll hate it if it says, ‘In times like these, our show ...’” says the 41-year-old songwriter passionately. “I’m sick of that. I’m embarrassed by everything, not just by Broadway, but by car companies, municipal bonds, every corporation, feeding off of ‘In times like these....’ Yeah, in times like these--and in any other time--people want great entertainment.”

Yet it is times like these that have given “The Full Monty” an opportunity to refashion a national tour that had hit rocky shoals even before the events of Sept. 11 sent Broadway and national touring companies into near collapse.

After a smashing world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in spring of 2000, Fox Theatricals’ musical version of its hit independent film about unemployed workers-turned-strippers stormed onto Broadway four months later and won rave reviews. Despite the misfortune of opening in the same season as “The Producers,” prospects were high that the show would do well when the first national tour of “The Full Monty” bowed in Toronto in spring of 2001 with a stop coming later at Los Angeles’ new Kodak Theatre.

But, despite good reviews, receipts were disappointing in Toronto (a hoped-for extension never materialized) and the tour limped into Chicago’s Shubert Theatre, where it was playing when the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred. Only an infusion of $1 million from the Broadway in Chicago organization (which is co-owned by Clear Channel Entertainment) kept the show from shuttering in that city four weeks early. The rest of the tour, however, was canceled.

“Things were looking very dire after Sept. 11 for us, both in New York and on the road, “ recalls Lindsay Law, who with Thomas Hall, former manager of the Old Globe, produced the Broadway show and the initial national tour for Fox Theatricals. “After Chicago, we were set to go to Washington, D.C., and I thought, ‘Oh boy, people will really be in a mood to see a Broadway musical there.’

“So Fox, as financier of both entities, decided to concentrate on protecting the original production in New York and to make the national tour somebody else’s project. We decided to bring on somebody who I know and trust and who I know adores the show.”

Exit Fox Theatricals. Enter the new licensees Kevin McCollum and his partners, Jeffrey Seller and Albert Nicciolino. McCollum, as president of the Ordway Theatre in Minneapolis, is familiar with national theatrical tours. As head (with Seller) of the Producing Office, he produced “Rent,” which did well financially in its road companies, including a long run at the Ahmanson Theatre.

“We always wanted the show,” says McCollum, who aggressively outbid a number of other suitors, including Clear Channel, for the U.S. touring rights. “When you’re always trying to find that new audience, a youth audience, as well as older men who think they don’t want to see musical theater, this is it: an original musical about guys and by a guy [Yazbek] who doesn’t come out of musical theater, and when you put him together with a director like Jack O’Brien and a writer like Terrence McNally, brilliant theatrical structuralists, my sense is that road audiences will just love it.”

The challenge was twofold. First, to restructure a new national tour that would make more financial sense: a diminution of the physical production that would cut the load-in time from four days to one, as well as shorter runs in theaters such as the Ahmanson, which would not only provide the tour a subscription base, but also partners who would have the infrastructure for selling single seats--something the Kodak did not.

Second, a new marketing and advertising team had to be brought in to revamp a campaign that had been criticized in New York and that continued to bedevil the production for months after the opening.

The initial ads had emphasized the male strip show that ends both the film and musical, expressed in an illustrated side view of bare lower torsos topped by discreetly placed police hats. Just before last spring’s Tonys--at which “The Full Monty” was clobbered by “The Producers”--that ad was replaced by a photograph of an exuberant cast fully dressed in “police strip-show drag.” “Those first ads, anything that hinted of male nudity, tended to send married men fleeing to the corner,” Law concedes.

Yazbek is more blunt: “Big errors were made in the advertising and marketing,” he says.

“My biggest concern was that this show not be ‘Footloose’ or ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ Our reviews said great new songs, funny, funny book, and I didn’t see much of that being advertised,” he added. “The marketing seemed to reflect this newness not at all. The ads were just more of the same, instead of being something different. Now, we have the chance to do it in a really different way, at least that’s what I’m hearing from these new guys.”

With the caveat that the new campaign is still in the formulating stages, McCollum said that what will be central is what he calls “the ‘Rocky’ mentality.” Like the Sylvester Stallone film in which a poor slob wins against all odds, the men in the “Full Monty” are losers, laid-off steel workers, who team together to triumph against adversity.

“It’s about family, about community, but in a hip contemporary way. And it starts with an earthly problem, the need for money,” he says. “These men achieve what is not thought possible, and they do it by teaming up together. It’s that camaraderie that makes it possible. And I think men can relate to that. And certainly women too, for that matter.”

Among the “new guys” on “The Full Monty” national tour is Drew Hodges, whose New York-based Spotco advertising and marketing company has created campaigns in New York and on the road for such shows as “Rent” and “Chicago.” Both shows feature powerful photographic elements and contemporary typefaces that convey the rawness of the respective musicals.

Hodges is circumspect in talking about any ideas he may have for the new campaign except to say that it will have little to do with the strip-show element.

“The musical is so not about that moment,” he says. “And what you’re really selling in advertising and marketing any Broadway show is not what will happen, but how is the evening going to feel.” While none of the marketing is likely to make Yazbek’s skin crawl by referring directly to the events of Sept. 11, the road company may find that the musical’s themes may be more resonant in the current emotional climate of the country.

Indeed, Yazbek points out that business appears to have rebounded--and then some--at Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theater, where the show is in its second year.

“It’s weird,” he says, “but even though everybody’s complaining about no advances for January and February, the theater is almost full every night.”

Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Ahmanson and Taper theaters, says that he is already detecting “a pulse of interest” from the public just from the announcement of show. He points out by way of contrast that in the aftermath of the terrorists attacks, sales for “The Car Man,” the Matthew Bourne dance theater production at the Ahmanson, were disappointingly flat.

“That particular film-noir kind of piece was not what people needed at the moment, but I think something like ‘The Full Monty’ is,” he says.

“It’s got comedy, a heartbeat and a victory, and I get the sense that’s what audiences are hungry for. Not just simply entertainment as escape, but they want to see a celebration of the human spirit and feel that they are part of it. Not just as observers, but really a part of it, a sense of community and survival. And this show has that going for it.”

Now going for it as well is another change in the social climate: the recession. When the show premiered in San Diego in 2000, the longest economic expansion in U.S. history was not yet in tatters. With an unemployment rate of about 4%, the anxieties of a desperate group of jobless young men demanded a certain emotional projection on the part of the audience--particularly one well-heeled enough to afford the price of a theater ticket.

No more. As the jobless rolls grow, the problems of the disparate characters in “The Full Monty” become ever more immediate. “These social and cultural things can’t really be marketed,” Davidson says, “but they’re definitely a part of the ozone.”

That may help the show overcome one of its biggest marketing challenges--one that has been with it since the beginning and that may account for the fact that it never became the hot ticket on Broadway that many had been predicting.

“I don’t think those first ads, the ones that got so criticized, turned off anybody,” says Jim Freydberg, a Los Angeles-based theater producer who has presented productions on both coasts but is not connected to “The Full Monty.” “The show’s problem from the beginning has been that the musical followed too close after the film’s release. People felt that they had already seen it.” The short engagements on the road will not allow the time needed for word-of-mouth to kick in. So McCollum says the campaign will have to convey the excitement of the live experience of “The Full Monty.”

“OK, so maybe you saw the film, but you didn’t actually see those guys going through their routines or hear David Yazbek’s score or Terrence’s funny lines,” McCollum says.

“You didn’t stand up and cheer at the end of film with everybody else in the theater like they are doing in New York. People have this desire to congregate more now, and if you can give them this kind of an experience, then I think we’re going to be just fine.

“But ask me again in a couple of months.”

*

Patrick Pacheco is a regular contributor to Calendar.