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© 1975 R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. 

[[image - color photograph of a woman holding a box of Winston Lights Cigarettes. She is taking one of the cigarettes out of the pack.]]

I demand two things from my cigarette.

I want a cigarette with low tar and nicotine. But, I also want taste. That's why I smoke Winston Lights. I get a lighter cigarette, but I still get real taste. And real pleasure. Only one cigarette gives me all that: Winston Lights.

[[box]]
Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health [[/box]]

14 mg. "tar", 1.0 mg. nicotine av. per cigarette.
FTC Report MAR. '75.
[[/advertisement]]

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[[image - black and white photograph of a person holding a clapperboard in front of two people holding headshot photos in front of their faces.]]

B'way Goes "Commercial"

Something happened to Broadway two years ago: it began to go commercial. What's that you say? That started decades ago? Not at all-at least, not in the contemporary literal sense. In 1973, Pippin offered a minute of itself to television watchers in an attempt to entice sit-at-homes into seeing the other 119 minutes live at the theatre. It worked. Pippin has drawn so many people that the show has profits in the millions. And now, almost all the plays on Broadway are moonlighting in tantalizing less-is-more formats as some of the best (and very successful) commercials on the air. 

Television is bursting with Broadway. Newswatchers burdened with reports of New York's fiscal crisis and besieged by clips of street crimes suddenly get a 60-second green fields respite: there is Shenandoah's meistersinger, John Cullum, striding through the countryside or sitting in a porch rocker lullabying a baby with "Papa's Gonna Make It Alright." The "Today" show audience, half-asleep and half-focused on an early morning intensive interview, is jolted into daylight with the '50s madcap Strum und Drang of Grease. 

Plays have taken to selling themselves this way because television commercials seem to be worth their high cost. They reach the fabled and long-sought "new audience," something producers have been searching for like the Holy Grail.

What is a producer to do if he is running a show that costs $60,000 a week to operate-just about the amount of his box office receipts. Does he fold it, let it limp along, paper the house to pack it and pray for word-of-mouth business, or try to find a paying audience to fill these empty seats? Obviously he would like to have his investment, which is large, both emotionally and financially, pay off, but an on-going audience hunt can be costly.

Producer-director Philip Rose was up against just such a problem with Shenandoah. "We got rather unusual notices," he recalls, "some raves and some completely opposed, but very few in the middle. We were struggling at the beginning. We were kind of a borderline show for the first four or five months. Then we won a couple of Tonys, and that helped." Yet Shenandoah was still far from a sell-out; so last June Rose embarked on a four week saturation

By Katrine Ames