Opening night of “the List” was yesterday (we have another show tonight at 7:30–come check us out at the Helen Gardiner) and we are currently waiting in anticipation for our review from Eye Weekly. In the meantime I’ve been reading other plays’ reviews and finding it interesting how bad reviews or mediocre reviews are being spun by the companies in their own promotional material.
I’ve had several conversation with friends about how people spin things in general. You know what I’m talking about. You run into a friend you haven’t seen in years and they ask what you’ve been up to and you pick out some positive highlights. that seems pretty normal. In the acting world it seems a bit more extreme.
I don’t find I do this. In fact, last night I ran into someone I worked with on a show 7 years ago and had lost touch with and she asked what I was doing, and I just said acting. I didn’t mention my one woman show that I’ll be performing in SanFrancisco in the fall. I didn’t mention the award I won recently for directing (for the first play I’d ever directed). I didn’t mention my impending wedding. I just said “Acting” *shrug*.
But I do know people who do spin things so that to the uninformed it sounds like they’re doing fantastically. If they had an audition for a commercial then they are “up for a tv role”. Or if they worked a day as an extra on a film starring Tom Cruise they “just spent a day on set working with Tom Cruise”.
I guess there’s nothing fundamentallywrong with that. It seems natural to look on the positive side of your life.
How does that translate to reviews and company promotion? Well the trend I’ve noticed is for companies to pick out key words that are (or could sound) positive, put them in quotation marks all by them selves (as opposed to as part of a full sentence quote) and leave out everything negative.
So a review that mentions the script as “a mess” and “is nonetheless good,” and “more than made up by the exuberance of all the performances” becomes that paper calling the show full of exuberant performances and “good”.
Yes, those words were in there, but it’s kind of like taking the real opinion out of the review. I remember seeing a film reviewed once that was touted in the film’s publicity as something like “tremendous” and the context was more like “tremendously horrible performances”.
How far can you take the spin and how acceptable is it?
edit: The Eye Weekly calls The List “EMPOWERING”
Fishbowl Theatre
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