Some of the theater posters Frank Verlizzo designed hang on the famous flop wall of Joe Allan’s restaurant. Some hold a prominent place in the homes of grateful Broadway stars. But many are images embedded in various parts of our brain via images in newspaper ads, on the side of buses, t-shirts, album covers, and up and down the Great White Way.
Many of those posters appeared in an exhibition at the New York Library or the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and are now in his coffee table book, “Fraver by Design: Five Decades of Theatre Poster Art from Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Beyond” Fraver has been his pen name since his student days at New York’s High School of Art and Design (combining the first three letters of his first and last names)
Click on any of the photographs of his posters below to read the captions explaining some aspect of the process of putting them together. “Fraver By Design”  contains these observations and anecdotes in six chapters — Broadway, Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Off-Broadway, Beyond, and Unpublished —  as well as those of 22 people with whom he’s worked over the past half century – producers, playwrights and stars like Judy Kaye and Bernadette Peters.
The art of theater poster design is inextricably linked to its commercial appeal:
“I must distill a two-and-a-half hour stage production into an image that is memorable and eye-catching, but most of all serves as an effective selling tool.”
This distillation is a tricky business, as press agent Susan L. Schulman observes in the book:
“It can’t give away too much but just enough to intrigue.”
When a show is not doing well at the box office, we learn, the producers sometimes hope that a redesign of the poster will cause an upswing.
The posters vary between graphic design and illustration, but they do seem to share Fraver’s general approach. “In my years of advertising,” Fraver himself says, “if I’ve learned nothing else, it is that simple is better.”

Fraver, 1978: “I grabbed a small office mirror, propped it up on my desk and drew a sinister-looking graphic version of my eyes” — at the last minute coloring them blue.

Inspired by the cave painting of Simba in the animated film and by the Broadway show’s costume and scenic design sketches, Fraver drew more than 50 versions of Simba’s head, until Disney animator Hans Bacher distilled the image into “the woodcut-like icon still used in advertising the show.”

For this, his favorite musical, Fraver was directed to make it feel like a travel poster. “Throughout the King and I poster history, I always felt that the lead character of the schoolteacher was shortchanged. The focus is always on His Majesty. Here I bring Mrs. Ann front and center along with a gilded symbol of Siam.”

For this poster of this 2004 play, Fraver was inspired by the movie poster designer Saul Bass, who designed the famous posters for Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Anatomy of a Murder and West Side Story

The advertising agency entertained almost 100 concepts for the poster for this Sondheim musical before settling on Fraver’s, based on an old woodcut. Sondheim’s final suggestion: “Add more blood.”

For this play about a hospital patient, the producers wanted something hopeful and upbeat, not depressing. “In my design I chose to focus on the white tiles one finds in most hospitals. These blocks were then pieced together to form the portrait” — first of star Tom Conti and, then, of his replacement a year later, Mary Tyler Moore.

Carrie lyricist Dean Pitchford sees this Fraver poster for the 2012 Off-Broadway production as capturing the duality of the show — the mysterious figure with tense shoulders and claw-like hands, the long shadow she cast, the flames; but on the other side, the vibrant colors, the title looking like the graffiti on a high school gym locker — and the “giddy mirror ball” on top.

Barrow Street Theater’s founding producer Scott Morfee: In Fraver’s artwork for Our Town, “It’s the “O” as the moon that moves the needle; it is subtle, peaceful and notes Wilder’s fascination with the sun, the moon and the stars –all major elements in his masterful play.”