It's not often that cameras capture a full-blown stage production and broadcast it on television. And it's unheard of for a play or musical to be televised when the show is still selling tickets on Broadway. But that's what MTV did this past weekend when it aired Legally Blonde: The Musical.

Conventional wisdom would have the producers planning a national tour or even an outing in Las Vegas before putting the show on television and giving away the entertainment for free. But there's little conventional about Legally Blonde.

It continues the trend on Broadway of taking popular movies and adapting them into singing and dancing extravaganzas. The Producers and Hairspray are two of the more recent and successful examples, and Young Frankenstein joins the club next month.

Legally Blonde is an adaptation of the popular 2001 movie about a fun and flirtatious U.C.L.A. student named Elle Woods who follows her ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law School. The plot of the musical closely follows that of the film. Elle gets tapped to help defend an aerobics instructor accused of murder. Along the way, she discovers that her boyfriend isn't really the effort while she falls in love with someone else.

So far on Broadway, Legally Blonde: The Musical, has been a moderate success. It opened in April to mediocre reviews and then failed to earn any Tony awards. Still, it managed to sell well more than 80 percent of its house through the summer. But the box office took a sharp dive the week after Labor Day, filling only about 59 percent of seats at the Palace Theater. Since then, ticket sales have slowly improved and are nearing 80 percent again.

The $12.8 million show has a long roster of producers, including two outfits that operate like mutual funds as well as about 100 individuals. Among the producers is Hal Luftig, president of Luftig Evans, a New York-based company that plans programs for regional theatres and other arts groups.

Luftig says an MTV executive caught Legally Blonde in June and then approached the producers to see if they'd be interested in airing it on the cable network. In order to make it happen, they had to get the okay from all the rights holders to the original film, the creative team behind the musical, and the unions representing actors, stagehands and others who work on the show.

They also had to confront an assumption.

"We work in the fairly antiquated business, where the thinking goes that if we put something on TV, it will kill sales," Luftig says. But Luftig says he put aside any concerns like those. "Especially with this audience on this network, they've proven they cannot see enough of this stuff as witnessed by High School Musical or when a movie comes out, like Hairspray."

Hairspray came full circle this summer. It started as a non-musical film in 1987, then became a Broadway musical in 2002, and finally was adapted as a movie musical this year. Hairspray sold out on Broadway for six weeks this summer even though the movie was on 3,000 screens around the country.

Luftig is confident the same will happen to Legally Blonde. And he thinks the exposure on MTV can only help when the musical goes on tour next fall, especially because by then, the TV presentation will be only a memory.

"The deal we have with MTV is they get to show it a maximum of six times and they have to show it at least three times within six weeks. And then it's done and frozen," Luftig says, adding that there won't be a DVD of the production. The next broadcast is scheduled for Friday at 11 a.m.

Another twist to the Legally Blonde story is that show is deeply rooted in real-world products. Somehow, the creative team—Heather Hach wrote the book while Laurence O'Keefe and Nell Benjamin handled music and lyrics—crammed in at least 15 references to specific companies or products.

Characters sing about or mention Allstate Insurance, Match.com, Yaegermeister, Splenda, Chanel, Calvin Klein, Tiffany jewels, and eBay as well as Elle and Vogue magazines. MTV gets a shoutout. And three brands—Jet Blue, Red Bull, and UPS—actually have something to do with the plot.

"We did not receive one penny from any of those people," Luftig says. "The authors made a decision that these are products a real 22-year-old girl would use."

Alan Cohen, spokesman for the League of American Theatres and Producers, applauds the Legally Blonde team for its "innovative marketing."

"A lot of people will be looking to see how well this performs and how it impacts the Broadway show in the future," he says.

Just as Legally Blonde is a story about a young woman whom people dismiss because she looks dumb, there might be more to this marketing approach than meets the eye.

by J. Jennings Moss