Dangling from the lingerie in Salt Lake City department stores are tags bearing the slogan “Removes easily—after an evening in the balcony.” Order Chinese takeout and your fortune cookie might read, “Man who takes woman to opera finds pleasure after.” And at local bookstores, falling out of romance novels are cards touting “Handsome rogues. Heaving bosoms. Moonlit trysts. And that’s just in the audience.”

It’s an unusual gambit for the normally staid world of classical music. Then again, today’s classical-music world is unusually desperate. Three seasons ago, the Utah Symphony and Opera decided it needed a new public face after years of declining attendance. So company administrators turned to a firm with relatively little experience in cultural promotions, R&R Partners, best known for conceiving the Las Vegas tourism catchphrase “What happens here, stays here.” The agency, which agreed to work for a third of its usual fee, targeted the campaign at the holy grail of arts groups: a younger, hipper audience. The archetypal operagoer is “an old person in a tuxedo that’s moldy,” says Sean Toomey, marketing director of the Utah Symphony and Opera. “The more playful approach helps break down the stereotypical image of stodginess.”

It’s clear that the ads have struck a nerve—and not always in a good way. One particularly saucy radio spot includes two announcers, a man and a woman, who break from a monotonous description of Verdi’s orchestration into moans of passion directed at each other. “This little old lady called me and said, ‘I know what they’re doing!’ ” Toomey says. “Of course, that was the whole point, but I thought, Oh God, what have we done?” In another instance, a radio station owned by the Mormon church declined to run the group’s ad for A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Parodying a morning-after conversation on Sex and the City, a woman describes waking up to discover that her one-night stand was quite literally an ass.

So last year, Toomey asked R&R to develop a similar but slightly less racy approach for the symphony’s fall campaign. The content isn’t sexual, but it’s still a far cry from the typical subdued list of upcoming repertory. For example, an ad for a Mozart performance reads “18th-century composer meets 21st-century pianist. Same music, better hair.”

Has the ploy worked? In an early test, ticket sales for the relatively obscure opera Jenufa, boosted by the campaign, were nearly on a par with the beloved Aïda’s. And in the first two years of the opera campaign, sales climbed 14 percent and 8 percent, respectively—a notable rise in a time when many arts groups saw declining numbers. (By comparison, Vegas tourism visits went up 5 percent and 3 percent in the first two years of its R&R campaign.)

But the long-term question is whether such tactics can really make repeat patrons out of its target audience rather than simply generate short-lived curiosity. Indeed, the climb in attendance is tapering off, with sales slipping during last year’s winter season. Toomey attributes this in part to an unrelated confluence of glitches—bad weather, construction, and competition from popular local productions of Chicago and Les Misérables.

In hopes of reviving the effort, this coming season R&R will change the slogan slightly (from “Experience the romance” to “Embrace the romance”) and put the messages in new places (coffee-cup sleeves and giveaway CDs at hotels). The agency is also considering an approach focused on a demographic that might have felt left out of the original campaign—those without a date for a romantic night at the opera—by selling ticket packages on LDSsingles.com, an online matchmaking site for Mormons.