Penn. HS must market Urinetown without using the title- Page 2

[IAMmyownMUSICAL]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 7:21pm

Look at it this way. Is the bishop going to be around them everytime they sell a ticket? Come on people, they are high school kids...do you honestly think they are going to listen to that crap.

No, they are just going to keep saying Urinetown...they'll just be smart enough not to say it in front of "the big bad bishop"

[James885]

Posted: 11/30/06 at 11:59pm

They can't possibly think that people are going to want to come to a show they don't even know the title to. I'm sure that the parents and friends of the cast and crew will go, but aside from that they're going to have a tough time marketing the show. But I second the idea of putting "You're in Town" on the flyers and tickets. Then once you have a "captive" audience, they could reveal the true title!

The worst people would probably do would be to walk out.

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 12/1/06 at 12:27am

Miss Pennywise can sing directly to the Bishop's face in the audience on opening night:

Why did I listen to that man?
Why did I listen to the nature of his plan?
And when he talked,
I should have balked,
I should have walked,
I should have RAN!
Why did I listen to that man...?

I hope their Miss Pennywise is a total nut. She has to be.

Updated On: 12/1/06 at 12:27 AM

[cathywellerstein]

Posted: 12/1/06 at 12:51am

why don't they do something like that? minus the actual title.
tell everyone to "just say it"

[Dover]

Posted: 12/1/06 at 11:29am

"The authors of Urinetown once joked that they thought of naming the show "You're in town"."

That's really funny. I don't necessarily think accommodating this kind of closed-mindedness is a good thing, but in the case of this particular show, millions of dollars has been lost because large numbers of people are turned off by the title. Yes, they're idiots, but this is a business, and if your show is going to fail for any reason, and an easily fixable reason, there is good motivation to fix it.

Especially now that the show is not on Broadway or touring, the creators have to rely on smaller productions, which are even more likely to be staged in places that would have difficulty with the title, schools in particular.

"You're in Town" is clever enough that IMO it would not be a total admission of defeat on the part of the authors if they let that be used as an alternate title in places that otherwise would not be willing to do the show. BTW, I think the objection people have is not to the title itself, but that they don't know what the show is like and assume the worst. After seeing it, I think most people would understand the title and accept it. If the show was staged widely enough with a cleaner title, eventually it might become so well known that more productions could use the original title because people would recognize the show as a popular musical, and not jump to conclusions about it from ignorance.

Again, it makes me sad that this conversation is necessary, but having heard this suggestion, I think it's funny to imagine the uptight folks going to see a show called "You're in Town" and basically getting tricked into seeing a show that they otherwise would have refused to see based on the title.

[Ourtime992]

Posted: 12/1/06 at 11:50am

if people can't get past the title, they don't deserve the experience of this wonderful piece of theater.

[Wanna Be A Foster]

Posted: 12/1/06 at 12:16pm

You know, Dover, lots of people need to get past judging a book by its cover. We can't always now and into eternity continue to give people a pretty cover, only to surprise them with something deep and worthwhile within. Because the bottom line is that some people don't have a pretty cover to offer. All they have is what's within. And if people don't want to dig deeper, it's really their loss.

[ErinDillyFan]

Posted: 12/1/06 at 2:00pm

I would go with a the dictionary phonetics, someone mentioned earlier.