Read on to discover the stage musicals that flopped spectacularly...
I must be one of the few journalists still alive who interviewed, at different times, four of the five men who created West Side Story – Leonard Bernstein, the composer; Jerome Robbins, the choreographer; Stephen Sondheim, the librettist; and Arthur Laurents, who wrote the dialogue. The fifth man, a fellow called William Shakespeare who worked a bit on the plot, never got back to me.
So, I defer to nobody in my appreciation of the genius that goes into making the great musicals. But may I be permitted to play devil’s advocate and put this shocking thought forward? Although the musicals genre has given us the most joyous entertainments humanity has known, it is also responsible for some of the worst evenings spent in the theatre.
And yes, I know spoken drama can be terrible too. I’m a survivor of Peter O’Toole’s Macbeth. Yet somehow, the fact that a musical involves so many dancers, singers, instrumentalists and (usually) epic stage effects, makes failure in this genre all the more catastrophic.
Stage musical flops... after just a few performances
Some dire musicals are put out of their misery after a few performances. Based on the Robin Hood legend, Lionel Bart’s 1965 disaster Twang!! (a show so bad it had two exclamation marks) lost £400,000 before it closed – equivalent to about £10m today – despite starring Barbara Windsor and Ronnie Corbett.
Bart wasn’t fazed. After all, he had also written Oliver! (with a little help from Charles Dickens), one of the great shows of the Sixties. So, after Twang!! ended he decided to create a musical based on a complex Fellini film, La Strada. It ran for precisely one night.
A few years later the former Radio 1 DJ Mike Read managed the same feat – creating a musical about Oscar Wilde that survived just one performance: its press night. Not surprising really, considering what the press wrote. ‘Two hours of leaden dross’ was one of the kinder verdicts.
Stage musical flops... with ludicrous subject matter
That surely failed, as so many musicals do, because the chosen subject matter was completely unsuited to the genre. In retrospect it seems ludicrous that anyone would turn Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s sprawling novel of macho whale-hunting, into a musical – let alone one set in the swimming pool of a girls’ school. Yet Cameron Mackintosh, usually the West End’s smartest impresario, poured a not-so-small fortune into getting this staged in the 1990s before general ridicule forced its closure.
And it was the Royal Shakespeare Company, no less, that dreamed up the idea of turning Stephen King’s horror story Carrie into a rock musical. Despite being universally scorned by the critics, the RSC took it to the West End then Broadway, where it proceeded to lose a cool $8m.
Even that calamitous misjudgement pales into insignificance when set beside an extraordinary 1990s musical called The Fields of Ambrosia – about an American state executioner who falls in love with the woman he’s about to put in the electric chair. He just about manages to sing the final chorus before being executed himself. As was the show – after one week.
Stage musical flops... even with God on their side
Even with God on your side, musicals can flop. The success of Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell in the 1970s prompted a spate of religious musicals, very few of which reached heavenly heights. I encountered two sacred turkeys. Bernadette, about a peasant girl who had visions of the Virgin Mary, was bizarrely booked into the Dominion, one of London’s biggest theatres, where it spectacularly failed despite a blessing from the Pope.
Then came Children of Eden, based on the Book of Genesis, which told the story of the Flood in such uplifting lyrics as: ‘Clearly God is miffed/He’s left us all adrift’. Appropriately, it sank without a trace.
And the unintentionally hilarious...
But if I had to pick one unintentionally hilarious musical I would dearly love to see again it would be Heathcliff, an adaptation of Wuthering Heights specially written so that Cliff Richard could play the title role. Why anybody thought the world’s most clean-cut pop icon could convincingly depict the savage, untamed anti-hero of Emily Brontë’s novel is a mystery. The show had about as much dark, primordial melodrama as the average episode of Blue Peter, and the reviews were, as someone quipped at the time, ‘withering rather than wuthering’.
Yet the star had the last laugh. His loyal army of fans – the legendary ‘cliff-hangers’ – filled every performance with a sea of blue-rinsed heads, and the production made its backers a fortune.
