Photographing a Tender Tale for a Play Poster
If you have followed this blog much, you may have seen that I have created quite a few posters to promote the plays and musicals at The Footlight Club, America’s oldest continuously running community theater.
This past fall, they asked me to create one for “A Man of No Importance.”
It’s a lesser known musical, based on a 1994 film, starring Albert Finney and featuring a book by Terrence McNally.
Director Vito Abate and Director of Marketing Michael Colford sat down and looked at the show’s themes, the historic period and sketched out some ideas for promoting the show.
Taking place in 1964, in Dublin, Ireland, Alfie, the lead character is coming to grips with his with his sexuality and the trouble that can bring in that society.
According to the story, a green carnation was traditionally used by the underground LGBTQ culture to help them identify each other.
So, we knew that had to play a roll in our poster.
We also knew that the lead actor, Adam Sell, who we photographed for “Promises, Promises”, was going to bring an amazing authenticity to the role.
Our challenge was to capture that in the key art and convey it to the potential audience.
Poster Photography to Match Production
We kept the poster as clean as we could, to match the almost black box set.
This meant that we needed to direct the photography as soulfully and as authentically as we could.
David Alger, the costumer, worked to get us a costume ahead of schedule so we could do the photography.
He has previously worked on a great number of Footlight Club productions over the past few years.
Sell Out Show
The results of our labors was an increase in ticket sales throughout the run, culminating in an almost sold out last weekend.
Adam Sell brought his A Game to the studio, with soulful eyes and a killer mustache.
- Tags: character portrait, Footlight Club, poster
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