Deirdre Alby and Tim Kashani explain how theatrical key art is made today. Before any design work starts, Deirdre builds a strategic plan defining the target audience and show's strengths, then creative teams generate options tested against that profile. For Pump Boys, identifying women 45+ as the primary market led them to choose a male-focused image of a man's back with a harmonica and fork over a female-focused alternative.
Used to be when we were developing key art, right? Example, we'd sit around a room, 5 or 6 people, artists would show a number of different versions and we'd vote on it, and then that was the art and that went out for a long time. Today, because you can get data back and test on it, I'm finding two different schools of thought. Yeah, people that are still like that way and want to go that way, and other people that are much more open to, to testing.
I kind of want to marry both. I mean, before When I start working on a show, I actually lay out a strategic plan before we even start looking at the art. One of the shows that we've got in development is Flashdance. So before we even thought about the art, I laid out, okay, who is the audience for this? What are the problems with the show? What are the strengths about it? All of those kind of basic take all the emotions out, let's see what this means. And then from there, you know, then from there the creative comes. So if I have a strategic plan and sort of a little bit of a guide, then we can get all creative and we can find all these different solutions, but take away the ones that don't speak to that strategic plan. So for another example is when we were working on Pump Boys, which ended up not coming in, the key art, we knew that we were talking to women. We knew that that was going to be the core audience of this. And that's, you know, we knew we were also talking to women that were probably 45 plus. You know, we had all of these demographics of, of who this audience member was going to be. The key art ended up being a guy's— the back of a guy's jeans with a harmonica and a knife and fork sticking out of it. And we were looking at two pieces of key art. One was one was a woman's backside. And, you know, we went right back to the strategic plan. Who are we speaking to? We're speaking to women. Okay, then we have to use the guys. Do you know what I mean?
I do, I do.
I mean, that's so simple, but—
But without it, you might look at the other one and be emotionally—
Right.
The beauty of it and say, well, let's go with that.
Right. So, yeah, I mean, I think the problem with Broadway is we don't have enough money to really do a whole lot of measuring beforehand. I mean, it costs to really— to test art, it costs a hell of a lot of money. So until we can get to the point where we're really doing audience testing, I think you sort of have to go with some kind of strategic plan. And maybe that, you know, I mean, that to me, laying out a strategic plan, you know, involves looking at what else is in the industry and, you know, talking to some key people and, you know, sort of figuring out. It's not just, you know, off the cuff, oh, I'm gonna put in this strategic plan. So a lot of thought goes into what that is before, but I would love to do more testing. It's just budgets.
