NY Post reviewer Elizabeth Vincentelli calls out the WONDERLAND marketing as "deceiving"...
"Despite what the ads for "Wonderland" claim, I did not say that the show is "a wondrous journey!" That pull quote is an egregious distortion of what I actually wrote in my review .
Here's the full line: "As in the original story, Gregory Boyd and Jack Murphy's book sends Alice (Janet Dacal) on a wondrous journey." Now, this sentence clearly refers to the plot, not the show -- described in the previous sentence as ""this flat new Broadway musical." (The ad also put in the exclamation mark, because why the heck not?)"
"You're The One That I Want!" comes to mind from the last Grease revival... they quoted just about every article that mentioned the reality series, Grease: You're The One That I want!
Not necessarily a reviewer dismissing a pull quote, but it stirred up some commotion.
It happens quite frequently, but doesn't always go reported. Seeing this thread, I immediately thought of Marlowe, a disastrous rock musical from 30 years ago that played the long-departed Rialto Theatre. Frank Rich, The New York Times, wrote the following:
WHEN everything goes right in a musical, the audience feels a rush of exhilaration that is the quintessence of Broadway. And what happens when everything goes wrong? Well, when everything goes wrong, another kind of giddiness sets in - that same slaphappy feeling that comes when Laurel and Hardy send a grand piano crashing down a flight of stairs.
Such is the perverse pleasure offered by 'Marlowe,' a wholly ridiculous show that is much more fun to sit through than many merely mediocre musicals. Like such famous Broadway fiascos as 'Kelly,' 'Rachel Lily Rosenbloom' and 'Rockabye Hamlet,' this one has the courage to meet vulgarity far more than halfway. If 'Marlowe' isn't quite a classic of its kind, that's a matter of size, not content. Tacky-looking and sparsely populated, this show lacks the Titaniclike splendor and expenditure of Broadway's all-time fabulous wrecks.
Connoisseurs of theatrical disaster will still find much amusement in the self-described rock musical that opened last night at the Rialto. In attempting to give us a song-and-dance account of that madcap Elizabethan playwright, Christopher (Kit) Marlowe - the one who had 'the devil market cornered' - the co-authors, Leo Rost and Jimmy Horowitz, have left no folio undefaced. The insanity begins with the opening scene, in which Queen Elizabeth I (Margaret Warncke) dispatches a lover with the line, 'Don't forget your codpiece!'
The Marlowe advertising quoted Rich as saying "Giddiness sets in - that same slaphappy feeling that comes when Laurel and Hardy send a grand piano crashing down a flight of stairs," with none of the context that Rich had provided for that statement. When the show somehow lingered on for several weeks, Rich took the show to task with another column.
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
For "Subways Are For Sleeping", David Merrick hired seven people with the same name as the chief theater critics, gave them tickets to the show and then published their positive comments. It was one of Merrick's great publicity stunts.
If anyone ever tells you that you put too much Parmesan cheese on your pasta, stop talking to them. You don't need that kind of negativity in your life.
The show's website is so sad. There are literally two pull quotes that alternate at the top of the page. I remember thinking it was weird that they pulled from the New York Post when I saw that on their site.
"There’s nothing quite like the power and the passion of Broadway music. "
I took a class with Peter Marks of the Washington Post and he spoke of this often. He said that every once in a while he'll approach the producers if the pull quote is really outlandish, but that nothing is every really done about it. In our theatre criticism class he taught us to avoid making statements that could be used as possible pull quotes if our reviews were largely negative.
Wasn't there a show that used pull quotes from readers who posted comments on the New York Times reviews online, and simply credited them to the New York Times (or maybe NYTimes.com?), as if they'd been written by the paper, not a random reader commenting?