Guidelines are increasingly used to regulate how local authorities engage in practices. Focusing on the Danish national health promotion guidelines, this article reveals that the local policy workers did not implement the guidelines as proposed. Using a dramaturgical framework, it illustrates how the local policy workers front-staged some practices in the implementation process and back-staged others. The local policy workers deliberately performed ‘guideline compliance’ by using information control and impression management techniques. The findings suggest that local guideline compliance should be regarded as a staged performance in which deliberate techniques are used to produce and manage certain impressions of compliance.