Tuesday, November 9, 2021

This is why we tell the story

 In a case of falling victim to targeted adverts, I ended up buying Stephen Purdy's Second Edition of Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century Part I: The Creatives thanks to something I saw scrolling. 

According to his afterword, this came about due to a question of of a theater seminar he was leading, which lead into getting in touch with people involved in several levels of productions that are now considered failures. 

Frankly, some of them I expected to be included (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark), some I was surprised to see were considered flops (Rocky), most I had never heard of, and in a few cases (Lestat) I found myself wondering who thought they'd be a good idea in the first place. 

Anyway, the book covers 13 musicals that either did not return the money invested in them, closed very quickly, or really disappointed in other ways. (In almost every case, ticket sales were below 50% for every performance prior to closing; most shows need at least 70% to remain profitable enough to keep running.) In some cases, like Glory Days, Wonderland, and King Kong, the shows never really got taken through a lot of development processes like out of town tryouts or workshops, and therefore couldn't get the kinks worked out prior to arriving in New York. Others did well out of town, but failed to find an audience in New York (Cheeseburger in Paradise.) Some (Dance of the Vampires) had too many cooks trying to fix things (In that last case, the star of the show got all kinds of creative control, and wound up becoming "Liberace as a Vampire"). Some had dream teams of creatives, like Elton John and Bernie Taupin working with big name choreographers, but the book kept changing while the music didn't (Lestat. Again, I have yet to figure out how a condensed version of Anne Rice would work as a musical. If by some chance one of our local troupes produces it, I'd love to see it.) 

Hearing more about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was also very entertaining, since the music I heard from it was good (written by Bono and The Edge from U2), but all I ever heard was the number of accidents involving the show. While the accidents likely did play a big part in the fact it lost $20,000,000, the number of rewrites (the first act ended with a battle between Green Goblin and Spider-Man, the second act involved a new character named Arachne trying to trap Peter in her web in dreams... The words tap dancing spiders was used to describe this. It was supposed to end with a big shot of webbing cannoned off the stage onto a screen like a splash page in the comics. Sadly, the device never worked, everyone hated the second act, so they stretched out Act I into two acts, with a thrilling aerial finale.)

Another, Glory Days, has the honor of being one of the rare shows to close the night it opens. Which is sad, since by all accounts, the show was a diamond in the rough, and ran into issue of hitting Broadway before it was really ready to be there. (It fell victim to market research saying a scaled down intimate show would play well in a cavernous setting.) Which is sad, since the plot synopsis listed with the show makes it sound like it would be a good watch, but the stress of the show evidently nearly ended the friendship of the guys who wrote it. 

Cheeseburger in Paradise evidently did really well in tryouts in more tropical climes, but New Yorkers (and tourists) evidently weren't all that interested in getting drunk and listening Jimmy Buffet songs. 

By far the one thing that sticks out in almost every story here is exactly how many good things people involved in these shows had to say about them. These folks remain invested in things that have long since gone dark, telling fun tales from behind the scenes, and discussing why they think their show didn't find an audience. 

All told, while some of the shows in here might find new life either touring or a revival either in New York or a local production, they all succeeded in opening on Broadway, a feat not every show gets. And frankly, it sounds like many of these shows deserve another chance somewhere.

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