By Jim McCarthy Aug 27, 2009 0 comments

If You Talked to Your Friends about Your Show the Way Your Copy Talks about Your Show…

Inspired by the wonderful illustration from Gaping Void (do click on that link…five seconds,  totally worth it).

If you talked to your friends about your show the way your copy talks about your show, well, maybe they wouldn’t punch you in the face, but they’d probably think you were weird.

Imagine you’re sitting at a table in a restaurant or over a drink with a friend you haven’t seen in years, but who’s in town for a couple days and wants to enjoy the visit.  You happen to have a show running at the moment, and you’re enthusiastic about it.

When your friend asks for a suggestion, do you describe your show as “The west coast premiere of one of Ibsen’s least performed works, choreographed by Joe Johnson who won a Tony for his work on Phantom”?

I think not.

You speak conversationally about what you like about the show.  You say it in a way that your friend will be able to connect to.

You might say, “it’s the story of an eskimo and the captain of a spaceship, trapped inside a video game.  The lead actor, who plays the eskimo, was Frasier’s dad on Frasier.  There’s a scene where the eskimo and the Space Captain have to fight a gorilla that’s absolutely hysterical, but even though it’s funny, it’s also very touching because the eskimo and the Space Captain learn a lot about each other’s worlds and become life long friends.”

I bet you’re kind of interested in seeing the show I just described. (Feel free to take that idea and run with it.  Credit me somewhere.)

The point is that this kind of personal, straightforward kind of conversation is much easier to translate into your event copy than you think.  Drop the mask and just talk to people like they’re standing in front of you.

Trevor O’Donnell had a good take on this too.

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