A missing page in the Playbill for Spamalot, the Broadway tour currently playing at the Music Hall at Fair Park, has fueled a ferocious little fuss among the free magazine’s publisher, the Dallas Summer Musicals and Irving’s Lyric Stage.
Lyric’s founder and artist director, Steven Jones, bought a full-page ad in the Playbill to announce his company’s new season lineup. Lyric is a small local theater company that stages four musicals a year at the Irving Arts Center using singers, actors and musicians who work almost for free. Their next season begins in September with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.
Jones says he sent Playbill, based in Florida, a check for $5,400 dollars more than a month ago to pay for the ad space. He also says he approved the layout of the ad, which was supposed to go on a right-facing page in the publication during the run of Spamalot. As an advertiser Jones also was granted a couple of opening-night tickets to the big-budget musical. But he had auditions to attend to this past Tuesday and switched the tix to Wednesday.
But by the time he got to Fair Park to see the show, he’d already heard from theater pals that his ad wasn’t in the program. He says he was even more surprised to discover that the page his ad had been printed on had been sliced out of each copy of Playbill handed to Spamalot theatergoers. Well, almost every copy: At intermission, Jones found a box of Playbills at one entrance that hadn’t been scissored. There was his ad, just as he’d approved it, opposite the page listing the cast of characters in the Monty Python-inspired musical.