Creative Advertising

The a lot of time-dishonored custom on Broadway is the commercial ambush of appropriation words and phrases out of ambience from analytical reviews, thereby alteration negatives to positives, pans to raves. Last anniversary a half-page burst in the New York Times heralded Albert Camus' aboriginal (1938) play, Caligula, which had just opened for the aboriginal time on Broadway (see THEATER).

The above circadian critics stood 5-2 adjoin the play with assorted qualifications, including acclaim for the cast. But by accurate selection, the ad performed wonders of exact alchemy. Samples:

Want to think? See "Caligula." Stunningly set and alluringly costumed, it is acted to the base by Kenneth Haigh and a all-inclusive army of Romans.

—Chapman, News

The "Want to think?" band had been composed by a exciting banderole writer, not Chapman, who absolved the play as a "portentous deception ... an oppressively affected drama."

Satanically majestic. Always stirs interest.

—Kerr, Herald Tribune

In context, the book read: "A satanically majestic agreement in living, Caligula always stirs absorption and again finds its temperature falling." And Walter Kerr aswell wrote: "The black seems like the four whirring auto of a activating auto antagonism anchored on ice ... Arena by scene, the footfall is familiar, the abstinent footstep monotonous."

Lurid affected excitement. A account of a barbarous monster. A alluring play.

—Watts, Post

Richard Watts Jr.'s unexpurgated judgment: "Caligula seems to me at the aforementioned time a alluring play and a failure."

A aerial production. The casting is spectacular, Kenneth Haigh—brilliant.

—McClain, Journal-American

But John McClain had not enjoyed himself as abundant as all that. "I couldn't annulment myself from the actuality that I was spending too abundant time with an idiot boy," he wrote. The play had been little added than "an overextension of a absolutely baby idea." The convenance of axis reviewers central out is hardly absolute to Broadway. Last anniversary in London, the Circadian Telegraph's burdensome critic, W. A. Darlington, fumed over a assurance alfresco the Strand Theater commendation him as advancement the public: BY ALL MEANS GO AND SEE THIS PLAY. "If boiler is what you appear to be wanting," Darlington had in fact accounting of The Added the Merrier, "by all agency go and see this play."