I believe there are two reasons people don't go to theater more often: higher ticket prices and lack of information. If you only have a written review by some snoby artsy people and no friend to recommend a play, you might as well go see the latest Transformer - at least you know what you going to get for your money.<p>If there was a company that produced nice and professional looking (like holywood) trailers of theater plays I believe it could make good business helping producers and theater companies raise their revenue.
There are <i>a lot</i> of trailers made for Broadway. Even tours of Broadway shows have trailers advertising when a show is coming to a city near you.<p>A lot of plays (not musicals) might not have trailers, I don't follow plays as I do musicals.<p>But I suspect the reason there are fewer commercials available to a wider audience is actually due to the type of audience they want to attract. Neither theater owners nor performers/actors want the typical movie-goer to be the audience screaming, talking on their cell phone, or generally doing anything against the rules. At a Broadway show excessive phone use or talking can get you kicked out. Trying to take a picture often <i>will</i> get you kicked out.
This is a good example of how parallelism sometimes totally breaks down. Theater and film seem quite similar so your trailer idea sounds logical. To see the problem with it, talk to any person involved with theater, they will absolutely hate it, it goes against everything they are trying to do. See, most movies are created for commercial entertainment, while theater productions are rarely so (at least they don't see this in that light). Think about a trailer for a Chekhov play or a recent one, say <i>Burning</i> by Thomas Bradshaw. To many ears the idea is abhorrent.
Probably the trailer, as we think of it in the movies, is too expensive. Trailers are shown to and amortized across a national audience, and I assume are placed in front of movies where the audience will have a positive response.<p>That said, I see static local ads in the discount theaters. I suppose a theater owner would show any ad that was paid for, but most movie theaters are chains and probably make large deals for the trailers, just like they do for the movies.<p>Or something.
I developed a site called StageGrade (<a href="http://www.stagegrade.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.stagegrade.com</a>) that aggregates theatre reviews.<p>We hope to at least get around the problem of having to overly rely on one or a few professional critics' reviews by aggregating them all and also by allowing users to leave their own reviews which are given equal visibility to the critic reviews.