PEMCo presented “Thoroughly Modern Mille” as its mainstage musical in February 2016, and I served as producer and director of marketing and audience services.

Our pre-show marketing featured images taken at Tippecanoe Place in South Bend, Indiana. Once we began dress rehearsals, we added production photos to our online promos.

“Thoroughly Modern Millie” posters and promotional photos, with art direction, graphic design and on-stage photography by Lesley Stevenson:

The red campaign + confronting stereotypes

In addition to photos featuring the cast, we producers wanted a graphic representation for the show’s collateral that would represent the show as a historical piece. So, I designed the image of a flapper on a red background to be used for programs, posters, T-shirts, flyers, postcards and more, and it integrated perfectly into a poster for the first-ever post-show discussion.

“Millie” features a female character in yellowface. We knew this would be a challenging plot point for any production of “Millie,” but even more so for a production on a predominantly white, Midwestern campus. As one way of making the blatant foolishness and absurdity of the yellowface more apparent, we took the playwright’s option of casting a man in the role typically played by a woman, but we wanted to go further in exploring the topic with the Notre Dame community.

I hosted a Q&A with three professors about race and representation in the theatre after the opening night performance. The graphic approach to the marketing of the talk-back helped streamline the figures and point to some of the very stereotypes and tropes that needed to be discussed. Approximately 100 people attended the event.