Creative Advertising

The most time-dishonored custom on Broadway is the advertising trick of lifting words and phrases out of context from critical reviews, thereby changing negatives to positives, pans to raves. Last week a half-page splash in the New York Times heralded Albert Camus' early (1938) play, Caligula, which had just opened for the first time on Broadway (see THEATER).

The major daily critics stood 5-2 against the play with various qualifications, including praise for the cast. But by careful selection, the ad performed wonders of verbal alchemy. Samples:

Want to think? See "Caligula." Stunningly set and magnificently costumed, it is acted to the hilt by Kenneth Haigh and a vast army of Romans.

--Chapman, News

The "Want to think?" line had been composed by a heady headline writer, not Chapman, who dismissed the play as a "portentous charade ... an oppressively pretentious drama."

Satanically majestic. Continually stirs interest.

--Kerr, Herald Tribune

In context, the sentence read: "A satanically majestic experiment in living, Caligula continually stirs interest and then finds its temperature falling." And Walter Kerr also wrote: "The evening seems like the four whirring wheels of a high-powered automobile racing immobile on ice ... Scene by scene, the footfall is familiar, the measured tread monotonous."

Lurid theatrical excitement. A portrait of a sadistic monster. A fascinating play.

--Watts, Post

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

A towering production. The cast is spectacular, Kenneth Haigh--brilliant.

--McClain, Journal-American

But John McClain had not enjoyed himself as much as all that. "I couldn't divorce myself from the fact that I was spending too much time with an idiot boy," he wrote. The play had been little more than "an overextension of a quite small idea." The practice of turning reviewers inside out is hardly exclusive to Broadway. Last week in London, the Daily Telegraph's exacting critic, W. A. Darlington, fumed over a sign outside the Strand Theater quoting him as urging the public: BY ALL MEANS GO AND SEE THIS PLAY. "If triviality is what you happen to be wanting," Darlington had actually written of The More the Merrier, "by all means go and see this play."

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