The technicality of the musical flop

There are many musicals that can run for decades and be seen by millions of people, and yet there are others that fall by the way side, showing that  this level of success is difficult to attain. Although shows like The Lion King, Billy Elliott and Wicked seem to be enduringly popular with audiences, there are many shows that have been forced to bow out of theatres early due to poor ticket sales, terrible reviews and even problems behind the scenes.

Recent examples of West End failures include the Spice Girls’ musical Viva Forever and the Phantom of the Opera sequel Love Never Dies. Both shows had talented people at the helm, as the former was written by Jennifer Saunders and produced by Judy Cramer (Mamma Mia’s producer), while Andrew Lloyd Webber composed the latter. However, they received largely negative reviews resulting in disappointing ticket sales and shortened runs, with Viva Forever closing after seven months and Love Never Dies closing after just over a year.

But these recent flops are practically success stories in comparison to some theatrical disasters of the past. The Lord of the Rings was one of the most expensive West End musicals ever made (with a reported budget of £12 million), but it seemed doomed from the start when a preview performance in 2007 had to be cut short due to an actor catching his leg in part of the moving stage. The Evening Standard dubbed the show ‘an empty-headed and messy extravaganza.’  It managed to run for just over a year.

In 2008, Gone With the Wind was derided for being excessively long and dull by critics, some of whom were so bored by the show that they even refused to watch its second half. This resulted in poor ticket sales and closure after just less than two months. For others like Behind the Iron Mask, whose leading man was ridiculed for wearing ‘headgear that gives him all the sex appeal of Hannibal Lecter crossed with a Teletubby’ (The Guardian), and Too Close to the Sun, whose musical score was criticised for being ‘banal, borrowed and clumsy’ (The Times), closure came after mere weeks. But the decade’s biggest theatrical failure has to be Oscar Wilde: The Musical, written by former Radio 1 DJ Mike Read, which closed after a single performance because of scathing reviews and only five tickets sold for the second night.

Many of the most extreme pre-noughties musical flops have baffling premises that make us now wonder what on earth everyone involved was thinking. Does Which Witch, a rock opera that ends with its heroine being burnt at the stake, sound appealing to you? Or how about Moby Dick, which tells the story of teenage girls trying to stage a production of the titular novel in their school’s swimming pool? One of the most infamously misjudged musicals of all time is Carrie, based on the horror film, which began in Stratford before transferring to Broadway in 1988, where it closed after twenty-one performances and lost $8 million. This made it Broadway’s most expensive flop at the time, and the show is still remembered and mocked for its fake blood that resembled ‘strawberry ice-cream topping’ (The New York Times) and its bizarre, tasteless subject matter.

Nevertheless, a few musicals with initial setbacks have actually managed to avoid becoming flops. On Broadway, the infamous Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was repeatedly delayed, recast and rewritten, while several cast members suffered injuries during rehearsals and preview performances. In one preview, a stuntman fell over twenty feet into the orchestra pit and was consequently hospitalised. Critical reception of the show was far from encouraging, but it proved to be quite popular with audiences, especially with tourists, before finally closing in January 2014 after running for two and a half years. It can’t be said that it was a huge success, but it did surprisingly well considering that it encountered so many problems and almost seemed to be cursed. Its naive writer who was swept up by the big names producing the show, has written an entertaining book, Song of Spider Man, to capitalise on the disaster of a musical, which he saw as doomed from the start.

It should also be remembered that some of the West End’s most successful musicals were initially thought to be doomed to failure. When Les Misérables opened in 1985, it was met with mostly negative reviews, but performances quickly sold out and it is now the world’s longest running musical, having been on the stage for nearly thirty years. Similarly, We Will Rock You opened in 2002 and was almost universally panned by critics, with The Guardian describing the premise as ‘sixth form’, Time Out advising that ‘theatre fans may want to look elsewhere’ and comedian Stewart Lee (who wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera) labelling it as ‘art that lies and is made with nothing but contempt for its audience’. But We Will Rock You is still running twelve years later and its popularity with audiences does not appear to be declining which goes to show that even if critics deem a musical to be a flop, initial reaction does not necessarily indicate that audiences won’t love it.