"Garbo laughs!" was the publicity for Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), which prepared audiences to accept the mournful Swedish star, previously seen in melodramas, in a comedy.
Brooding monochromatic portraits of Chris Pine as James Tiberius Kirk and Heroes' Zachary Quinto as Spock have been glowering down over American cityscapes for several months now and prepared audiences for the leading crew members' onscreen battles rather effectively.
Just as none of the elliptical, dreamlike plays Ms. Parks had written previously had prepared audiences for the dramatic immediacy of "Topdog," you could not have used "Topdog" to predict the style of "... A".
I'm not sure her previous work will prepare audiences for the detail and completeness of this performance," he says.
And the hucksterish marketing tactics of the producer, Michael Myerberg, did not prepare audiences for the play's aesthetic radicalism.
These groups are chronically underfunded but do important work to prepare audiences to better understand development news.
His trenchant theatre criticism, praising Ibsen as the most significant dramatist of the time, attempted to prepare audiences for his own plays.
Today, the mere sight of a character approaching a crossing without a hi-vis jacket and a lollipop sign is enough to prepare audiences for the inevitable impact.
In his third Shakespeare screen adaptation (after "Henry V" in 1944 and "Hamlet" in 1948), Olivier added material from "Henry VI" to set historical context and, Mr. Lees says, gave the sets a surrealistic look to prepare audiences for the language.
But that could hardly prepare audiences for the ambition and reach of his black-comedy-with-a-conscience, Three Kings, about a gold heist that takes place at the end of the 1991 Gulf war.
Part of this strategy of familiarity was the inclusion of the two-piano arrangements of the symphonic poems as a way to prepare audiences for the orchestral versions.
