When Christina Applegate, starring in this year's production of SWEET CHARITY, broke her right foot during the show's Chicago tryout, Charlotte D’Amboise was tapped to assume the title role. Sainato swooped in to devise a new campaign featuring D’Amboise in dramatic silhouette, but Applegate made good on her promise to heal in time for the Broadway debut, and producers reverted to the original campaign, shot by Jill Greenberg.

THE BULL'S EYE
People are wont to judge theater advertising against movie marketing, but that’s an inherently unfair comparison. While Hollywood packs its formidable advertising budgets into a window of three months, a successful Broadway show must consistently funnel fewer media dollars into advertising throughout its run, driving people to buy tickets every night, sometimes for years. Given that the world around a Broadway show can change during its long shelf life, even if the production doesn’t, SpotCo constantly revisits and revises its campaigns, responding in real time to a host of sometimes-unpredictable external factors.

According to Hodges, marketing theater is a matter of following the concentric rings of a target. A campaign begins by appealing to the bull’s eye, where avid Manhattanite theatergoers sit. Once those tastemakers have solidified a production’s success, the campaign shifts attention to suburbanites and American tourists following on their sophisticated neighbors’ heels, and finally international tourists. “You’re constantly having to open up your campaign,” he says, pantomiming the circles of his target. “That’s what a successful campaign does. It goes from this, to this, to this.”

In addition, there is nothing static about live theater. Scripts get tweaked. Actors get replaced. Bones, on rare occasions, get broken, as Christina Applegate’s right foot did this season during Sweet Charity’s Chicago tryout. And in the business of Broadway, the outside force with the biggest impact is critical response. “In The Post today,” says Hodges, “there’s a column handicapping the Tony race, talking about who’s going to win or lose.” Gesturing toward the corner of the room, he adds: “It’s in the trash can out there if you want to read it.”

Since its 2003 Broadway debut, AVENUE Q faced public skepticism that came to be known at SpotCo as “Puppet Bias.” Connoisseurs of theater, in other words, found it hard to accept that a production featuring fuzzy creatures could possibly appeal to their sophisticated sensibilities. SpotCo’s campaign set out to prove that the musical—and its puppets—was well worth the $100 ticket, not to mention the Tony it earned.

PUPPET BIAS
But the media surrounding Avenue Q last season swirled with particular vehemence, to which SpotCo responded in kind. At its August 2003 Broadway debut, critics complained that the quirky little import from Union Square’s Vineyard Theater had no business on Broadway. With its GenX humor and songs like “It Sucks to Be Me,” the musical had all the trappings of a downtown play that belonged downtown. Add puppets to the mix and you get Michael Riedel of The Post betting it would close by January.

SpotCo came out of the starting gate strong, battling the skepticism Avenue Q faced—which came to be known at the agency as “puppet bias”—with a campaign that audaciously features extreme puppet close-ups. Set against impolite headlines, the ads drive home the message that Avenue Q is nowhere near Sesame Street on the sensibilities map. That the musical should see success was unlikely, according to the old guard. That it should win a Tony for Best Musical bordered on blasphemy. Daniel Okrent promised in The New York Times that if the favorite, Wicked, with its $14 million budget to Avenue Q’s $5 million, “loses the Tony, I’ll eat my black satin jacket from the road company of Jekyll and Hyde.”

Soon, however, glowing reviews outnumbered the slams. Not a few critics were rooting for the underdog, and SpotCo played to win. Spoofing the concurrent presidential election race, SpotCo launched a series of red, white, and blue print ads that appealed to Tony voters directly. The ads were “Paid for by the Friends of Avenue Q Committee to win the 2004 Tony Award.” They reported such statistics as: “99% believe show is good for America,” and bragged that “Q-mentum builds as election nears.”

THE UPSET
There is no way to precisely quantify art’s impact on a show’s success. It would be easier to analyze the extent to which reviews in The Times make or break a show than the messaging in its ad pages. What is clear, however, is that SpotCo conquered puppet bias by continually reminding the public of the show’s strength: its wildly intelligent, wildly irreverent humor that held up a mirror to the absurdity of modern life at every turn. Avenue Q , beloved and belittled in equal measure, won Best Musical that year in an upset of astronomical proportions. And there’s no word on how Okrent seasoned his satin.

For Hodges, results like these confirm the power of design. He’ll tell you that branding a Broadway show is harder than any work he’s done before. In the same breath, he’ll say it’s also the most satisfying. On no occasion is this more apparent than on the night of the Tony’s. “When we used to design collateral for, say, MTV, yes, it was exciting,” he says, “but I always felt that it was like the end of Indiana Jones, when a workman takes the priceless artifact and sticks it into a huge warehouse where it will sit in obscurity for all time. With this work, we truly become a part of it—and so does the public.”