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The ubiquitous Broadway poster is more than just eye candy for the busy New Yorker and tourist. These pretty pictures, which cover so much of the city, convey — or at least suggest — the experience a Broadway production holds for the potential audience member. What will you see, hear and (hopefully) feel once you plop down your hard-earned money for a seat in one of Broadway’s storied theatres? It’s a show’s calling card. It helps put people in seats. Upon first glance, a Broadway poster may seem deceptively simple — a picture or graphic with a title and some credits. But a lot of very creative people put a lot of thought and effort into creating what’s known in the industry as “key art.” It’s this key art gets that gets spun off into the countless versions you see online, in the subways, outside theatres and above Times Square. The final product, in all its forms, depends on the show and the audience its producers wish to attract.
For Once, the Off-Broadway transplant about an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant brought together by music, the challenge was to reinvent a personal story for a broader audience. As Darren Cox, Associate Creative Director at SpotCo, an advertising agency that handles many of the most successful Broadway shows, explained, Once “…was this little fantastic gem of a show downtown that just flowered into this huge success.” The original art, which SpotCo also developed, had a “…very personal, slice-of-life kind of aesthetic, which was very intimating and moved to being good for downtown, but we found out that other needs arose when the Broadway shows.” The bigger stage and the bigger potential audience required an updated look and feel to get noticed. The art needed to pack more of a punch. According to Cox, “there was a little bit of a fear that the intimacy of the show and the kind of quiet beauty of the show could be sort of swallowed up…” The solution was to hold on to certain artifacts from the original as inspiration and then dial everything up. They hired a photographer and shot the actors in real environments — in the theatre, on the street, at a bar. “And then we pulled back in some of the graphics and the logo treatment that had that downtown intimate feel, but then married it to the larger brand.” Looking at the original and updated art “…you can see there is sort of this relationship where they do feel they’re kinda like in the same voice but one has a much stronger, louder, much more splashy kind of voice.”
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