Where oh where to begin? That would probably have to be with Tony Adams, a film producer whose only major stage credit was the Julie Andrews return to Broadway vehicle Victor/Victoria, which itself had a troubled history and didn’t turn a profit. He spent a number of years trying to get Marvel Comics to trust him to bring their prized property to the stage and in 2002, just before Spidey was to swing onto the silver screen, Marvel gave him the okay.

So who should write this show? Sondheim? Lloyd Webber? That young Lin-Manuel Miranda kid? No, he decided on Bono (aka Paul David Hewson) and The Edge (David Howell Evans) of the Irish super group U2. The lads had no theater writing experience, but they did have one significant flash of genius. That was that Julie Taymor, the visionary director of The Lion King, should direct the project. Though not a big comic book fan, Ms. Taymor agreed to direct, co-write and design the show, envisioning it as a modern-day Greek myth.  

In 2005 the creative team met in Tony Adams apartment to sign the contracts when Mr. Adams suddenly had a stroke, which killed him two days later. Undaunted, the team pressed ahead with David Garfinkle, an entertainment lawyer with no previous producing experience as the lead producer.

Now one thing was clear at the outset was that a Spider-Man musical was going to be expensive (“nobody wants to see a $20 million Spider-Man” Ms. Taymor later told 60 Minutes) and Spider-Man was budgeted at a whopping $30 million. Much of that budget went to gutting and redesigning the Hilton Theater (which would soon be rechristened The Foxwoods Theater, appropriately enough after a casino. It’s now called the Lyric).

Then in 2009, just as the theater was getting ready and casting was to begin, the creative team was given a rude awakening. The producers had gone through virtually the entire $30 million budget! The production crew was kept on salary while Garfinkle and company looked for new backers.

Though the Walt Disney Company had acquired Marvel Comics their theatrical department, run by long time Taymor champion Tom Schumacher, did not get involved. Instead Bono’s concert promoter Michael Cohl stepped in and began writing a bunch of checks to get the show back on track.

By the fall of 2010 the show was in rehearsals, but previews were continuously pushed back while the technical details were worked out. Unfortunately, two actors were injured during rehearsals.  

On November 28, 2010 the first preview was finally performed. Technical problems persisted and some previews were canceled. Two more actors were injured, one of whom was a stunt double that fell into the orchestra pit just as someone was recording it on their iPhone. The video quickly went viral causing even more problems (and soon one of many lawsuits) for the production team.

The previews piled up and the opening night kept getting pushed back. Critics, tired of being strung along decided to buy tickets and review the show anyway. The reviews were almost uniformly negative.  

In April of 2011 the show was shut down for re-tooling. Ms. Taymor was dismissed and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a playwright with a background in comic book writing, was hired to re-work the book and Daniel Ezralow took over as director.

Performances resumed and after a record 182 previews Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark finally opened on June 14, 2011. The critical response? Better, but still not very good. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity and all of the endless ink did sell tickets. During one nine performance holiday week Spider-Man grossed a record $2.9 million. But that was just one week. The show had a weekly operating budget of over $1 million, and with a final price tag estimated at $75 million it was clear that the show would have to sell out for God knows how long just to break even (the average $10–15 million musical must sell out for at least a year before it can break even). The environmental staging made a conventional touring company impossible and foreign producers had no desire to mount a production of this venomous property. Eventually the box office started to drop below that must sell point. Law suites continued to be filed, including one by Julie Taymor herself (who, to her credit, did stand by the production and showed up on opening night to wish the cast and crew well) and yet another actor was injured. Finally, in November of 2013 it was announced that Spider-Man would hang up his unitard in January. The producers announced a Las Vegas production, proved to be the usual wishful thinking that comes from a shirtless producer.

As the cobwebs cleared and as the Foxwoods was restored, the inevitable question was asked:  Did Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark  have potential? Could it have worked if the show had more experienced and fiscally responsible producers? Could it have worked with a better book and especially a better score? Most theatergoers admitted that it was a visually stunning production with some fantastic stage effects, but did we really need to be reminded for the umpteenth time how Peter Parker became the famous wall-crawler? That will forever be another great “what if” that accompanies so many ambitious flop musicals. But one thing is certain. More shows will open on Broadway and more shows will flop. They will be heartbreaking, embarrassing, noble in their intentions and ambitious in their scope. But when the smoke clears and the scenery is scrapped the creators can at least say, “well, at least it was no Spider-Man”.

The legend of Carrie  looms large. So large that she even inspired the best-selling book Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Flops. This show was conceived by songwriters Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford, who envisioned Carrie as a modern-day operatic tragedy (they came up with the idea after seeing a production of Parsifal). Eventually The Royal Shakespeare Company, flush with cash after presenting the world premiere of Les Miserables, and West German producer Fredrich Kurz agreed to produce the show.

Carrie premièred at the RSC’s main stage at Stratford-On-Avon. The inaugural production was, by all accounts, an unmitigated disaster. Barbra Cook, who was due to make her long awaited return to Broadway as Carrie’s Jesus freak mother was nearly decapitated during the Stratford run.

Despite this myriad of problems Carrie went right to Broadway where it opened in May of 1988, past the Tony Award deadline but way prior to the next season.

During the shows sixteen previews and five regular performances audiences watched an out of control musical that included typical high school teenagers dressed in studded leather, a young bully smearing pig blood on his chest, a massive staircase descending from the heavens and a blood-soaked prom queen getting stabbed by her mother (Betty Buckley, who played a sympathetic gym coach in the 1976 film version, took over for Cook on Broadway).

And yet as out of control as Carrie was, ask anyone who saw the show (and if everyone who claims they saw it actually did it would probably still be running) and they will tell you that in the midst of all this chaos was some truly soaring material, that the scenes between Carrie (Linzi Hatley) and her mother were fantastic, and that Betty Buckley gave the performance of her career. 

While there was intense interest in an encore production of Carrie Stephen King, who hated the show, refused to allow it to be revived. While many fans yearned for a cast recording Gore and Pitchford refused, wanting to put the whole debacle behind them (though one lovely song, “Unsuspecting Hearts” was recorded several times).

Alas, Carrie did not go silently into the night. Die-hard theater geeks distributed backstage demo recordings and a pirated video of the Stratford production showed up on YouTube nearly two decades later. Schools and theater companies put on their own unlicensed productions, sometimes incorporating new changes.

Realizing that the show had a life of its own, Stephen King and the creators eventually relented and allowed a revival to be produced Off-Broadway. Generally well received, this new production strove to emphasize what was good about Carrie (the intense scenes between mother and daughter) and omit what was bad (just about everything else). This revised production has already had three productions on the West Coast and may well continue to be performed. But nothing will surpass the cachet of having seen that original train wreck that was, in the worlds of Ken Mandelbaum, “every kind of flop musical combined”.

“a highly sophisticated animatronic/marionette hybrid that will be controlled by the integration of hydraulics, automation and the manual manipulation from a team of puppeteer/aerialists. … A group of 35 on-stage and off-stage puppeteers work to manipulate the large-scale puppet. Several puppeteers are positioned on swinging trapezes and others launch themselves as counterweights off the puppet’s shoulders to raise Kong’s massive arms as he runs and swipes at planes during the performance. … [The musical features] a cast of 49 actors, singers, dancers, circus performers and puppeteers; a crew of 76; and arguably the most technologically advanced puppet in the world – a one-ton, six-meter giant silverback”.

Thus described the great King Kong puppet and the musical version of King Kong when it had its world premiere in Melbourne, Australia back in 2013  The point need not be argued; the team created a remarkable simian protagonist.  Now all they needed was a show.

The musical that opened in Melbourne featured a book by Craig Lucas, music by Marius de Vries and lyrics by Lucas and Michael Mitnick.  The show also included songs by such musical acts as 3D, Justice and Sarah McLachlan, whose songs were mercifully not as depressing as the ones for her humane society commercials.

King Kong did very well in the land down under where it’s run was extended three times and ultimately ran for nine months.  The plan was then to bring the big ape to Broadway right away. Yet despite the success of the Australian production it was decided that the show needed, well, a new show.  And so, a new one was written by Broadway vets Marsha Norman and Jason Robert Brown.  The new book and score were workshopped but apparently the producers didn’t like what they saw so they asked Jack Thorne, author of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to write a new book and singer-songwriter Eddi Perfect to write a new score, with some of the previously written material surviving. When the show opened on October 5, 2018 the reviews were basically unanimous.  Kong the giant puppet was a wonder to behold.  King Kong the musical was not.  After an initial surge at the box office, Kong began running out of muscle.  After 324 performances he fell from the Empire State Building one last time, costing investors some $35 million.

When all is said and done, King Kong was not a musical about a giant ape but rather a special effect, and as George Lucas often stated (and at times forgot) a special effect by itself is a pretty boring thing.  Had Kong been conceived as a stage show in Vegas or Universal Studios it might have worked.  But on Broadway, which is very much a survival-of-the-fittest ecosystem, King Kong was much lower on the evolutionary ladder than he looked.

If ever a show looked like a sure thing, it was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The show was based on a well-loved Truman Capote novella that had just recently been turned into a hugely successful film. Producer David Merrick was still basking in the glow of his Hello Dolly!  triumph and thought he could repeat that success by turning Breakfast into a musical. The show was even given the very Dollyesque title Holly Golightly (after the main character) when it opened in Washington.  

Merrick hired two crack professionals, librettist-director Abe Burrows (Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) and Bob Merrill (Take Me Along, Carnival) to helm the project. But perhaps most exciting to theater goers, Merrick persuaded bonafide TV stars – Mary Tyler Moore (then of The Dick Van Dyke Show) and Richard Chamberlin (Dr. Kildare) to star.  

Alas, Breakfast at Tiffany’s quickly proved to be another example of a delicate, intimate source material blown up into a loud, slick piece of entertainment. While the show broke house records during it’s Washington try-out, it was clear that the show was in trouble. Even though Burrows had a well-deserved reputation as one of the best play doctors on Broadway, Merrick chose to replace him with Joseph Anthony, a director who had very little experience with musicals, while Edward Albee was hired to re-write the book, despite the fact that he had never written a musical libretto in his life.

For all the trouble the show faced in Washington, New Yorkers had already shelled out a record $2 million for advanced tickets. But Merrick knew full well that the critics were circling and ready to attack. So, what did this master showman do? He closed the show after just four previews, thus denying his mortal enemies the chance to trash his production. Merrick took full responsibility for the show’s failure. He also quipped that the eponymous Fifth Avenue jeweler had offered to underwrite the cost of the production if he closed it. “Of course, Cartier wanted me to keep it open” he added.

And so $2 million worth of refunds were issued. Many people wondered, was the show that bad? Not many people got to see the show, so few can say. But most who did said that the show was more of a Home Shopping Network quality than Tiffany’s.

In recent years a number of ageing rock stars have turned to Broadway hoping to find success. Some like Elton John and Cyndi Lauper have triumphed. Others like Bono (Spider-Man), Phil Collins (Tarzan), Jim Steinman (Dance of the Vampires) and Boy George (Taboo) have not fared as well. One of the more interesting fumbles was made by Paul Simon.

 The Capeman was an ambitious project about Salvatore Agron, a Puerto Rican gang member who was convicted of murdering two Hell’s Kitchen teenagers in 1959. Simon spent a decade working on the project with co-lyricist/librettist Derek Walcott. Such a subject matter was bound to cause controversy and the family members of the victims would soon let their discontent be known. But that wasn’t the only thing that went wrong with The Capeman.

This musical, conceived as an intimate oratorio would have been right at home at the Public Theater or the Beaumont. Instead Simon and his producers decided to produce the show on Broadway where it was capitalized at a ridiculously high $14 million. Despite this bloated budget, the show was not taken out on the road for a tryout. But the real damage was done by Simon himself, who boasted that he was going to show Broadway how a musical should be written. All this did was stir the ire of the New York critics who showed up on opening night with an axe to grind. The Capeman folded after sixty-eight performances.

Truth is The Capeman was a daring show that confronted a difficult subject matter. Much of Simons score was beautiful, mixing Latin rhythms with doo-wop. The show has since had two-concert stagings, one at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and one at the Delecort Theater in Central Park. Maybe a song cycle was the way to go all along.

During the 1970’s producer-director Harold Prince and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim collaborated on Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, five of the most original, daring and outstanding musicals Broadway has ever seen. Alas, none of these shows appealed to a wide audience. But in 1981 it looked as if Prince and Sondheim had finally hit on an idea that would give them the smash hit they so craved.

Merrily We Roll Along was based on a 1933 George S Kauffman-Moss Hart play that moved backwards in time. Prince felt that this show about lost ideals would resonate with a contemporary audience and Stephen Sondheim went to work composing a rich, melodic score in the best contemporary Broadway style while their Company librettist George Furth went to work on a book that opened in 1981 and moved back in time to 1955. Everything was looking rosy until Merrily was derailed by a series of dire miscalculations.

First, in order to save money, Prince and his fellow producers decided to forego the usual out-of-town-tryout and open cold on Broadway, never an advisable step. Next, rather than follow his original instinct and stage the show in an Our Town minimalist style, Prince had his set designer Eugene Lee build a gymnasium set that looked like it had been retrieved from the dumpster after Grease had closed.  

But most detrimental of all was the decision to cast the show with young teenaged actors. Though there were many talented youngsters on stage (Lonny Price, Liz Calloway, Tonya Pinkins, Jason Alexander, Giancarlo Esposito) their fresh-faced innocence just confused audiences, seeing as how they were supposed to be in their forties when the show began. Poisonous word of mouth spread like the plague and while a tremendous amount of work was done during the shows nearly two months of previews, it wasn’t enough. Merrily received scathing reviews and closed after only sixteen performances.

The day after the show closed the cast assembled to produce a cast album. This first-rate recording showed the world that this was one of Sondheim’s best scores ever and colleges quickly submitted requests to mount a production.  

Merrily began its afterlife in 1985 when James Lapine directed a revival at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. The script was revised, new sets were designed and, most importantly, the cast was age appropriate. Furth and Sondheim continued to revise the script until 1992 when Merrily made its London premiere. Since then there have been more than five thousand productions of Merrily.  A documentary about the making of the show was being produced by ABC back in 1981. The project was scrapped after the show flopped but was unearthed and used as the basis for the 2016 documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, directed by original cast member Lonny Price.

Well, they got the car to fly. That’s about the best thing you can say about this stage version of the 1968 movie musical that did quite well in London. Unlike Mary Poppins, another Dick Van Dykless stage adaptation of a movie with a Sherman Brothers score that would open across the street a year later, Chitty  remained slavishly faithful to the movie in which it was based. But heck, pretty much all the emphasis was put on that damned car, which rose and flew over the first few rows of the orchestra section. At the very end, after the actors took their bows, Chitty was wheeled out for her own “bow”. Critics had been carping for years about the falling chandelier in Phantom and the helicopter landing in Miss Saigon, but they took up very little stage time and both shows were very much about people. Chitty was about a car, and that wasn’t enough. It was six months before Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was sent to the impound lot and sold for scrap.

With On the Town, Wonderful Town and especially West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein had established himself as the most exciting composer working on Broadway. However, his busy conducting schedule ended up keeping him from the musical theater for nineteen years. He finally decided to get back in the saddle when his friend and former Harvard classmate Alan Jay Lerner came to him with a tantalizing idea for a musical.

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was originally conceived as a play-within-a-play in which actors are rehearsing a show about race relations in the White House. Coca-Cola agreed to bankroll the entire show, but it had to open in time for the 1976 bicentennial. Apparently, the show still needed work. The out-of-town-tryout was fraught with difficulty and the play-within-a-play concept was largely discarded except for at the beginning. The resulting show starred Ken Howard as every president from George Washington to Teddy Roosevelt and Patricia Rutledge (who received the shows best reviews) as every first lady. Gilbert Price and Emily Yancy play the two black servants who observe the countries race relations from the White House.  

While Bernstein’s music was praised, the critics savaged the show as a whole. Many accused the show of being liberal propaganda, and Lerner freely admitted that he came up with the idea after Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide re-election. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue closed after just seven performances.

It might seem like a no brainer that the show would at least spin off a cast album, but Bernstein refused to have the score recorded, seeing as how he reused the material for several future works, including his opera A Quiet Place. One beautiful song called “Take Care of this House” would be performed with some frequency. Two years after his death a revival was briefly seen at the Kennedy Center. In 1997 the score was heard on the BBC radio as A White House Cantata and was finally given a commercially released album in 2000. Much of the musical is beautiful and one can’t help but wonder if this show, with a little more time and focus, couldn’t have become one of the great musicals of all time.

In 1970 Australian émigré and Liza Minnelli’s first gay husband Peter Allen starred in a three-performance flop called Soon with future stars Richard Gere and Nell Carter. In the ensuing years this singer-songwriter went on to produce records, sing in nightclubs and even sold out Radio City Music Hall. By the late eighties the time seemed right for him to give Broadway another shot.

And what did he decide to do for his first real shot at Broadway stardom? Why, a musical about the life of legendary bootlegger/gangster Legs Diamond. Sounds like an odd choice for this flamboyantly gay entertainer with no real acting experience, no? Not to worry, Allen (who also wrote the songs) and his two librettists, Harvey Firestein and fashion designer Charles Suppon, decided to turn Legs into an aspiring Broadway hoofer rather than a cold-blooded killer. This might have made for a clever camp fest, but the show was horribly unfunny, untuneful, and just plain bad!

The show played for 74 previews before opening the day after Christmas. “I’m in show business, only a critic can kill me now!” proclaimed Allen/Legs while tap dancing on a coffin. He needn’t have egged them on. The critics shot Allen/Legs up so full of lead it’s a miracle the EPA didn’t get involved. Less than two months later the coffin was slammed shut on Legs Diamond for good.

The repercussions from this dreadful show didn’t end there. After suffering a string of flops throughout the eighties the Nederlander Organization leased and later sold the Mark Hellinger Theater to the Times Square Church, thus depriving Broadway of one of its biggest and most opulent theaters. Shortly before his death the shows original choreographer Michael Shawn was awarded $175,000 in damages when he claimed that the producers had fired him because he tested positive for AIDS. Peter Allen himself died from AIDS related throat cancer in 1992.

In his seminal book Not Since Carrie, 40 Years of Broadway Flops, Ken Mandelbaum refers to Legs Diamond as “a starring vehicle without a star”. If that’s true then the 2003 Peter Allen bio-musical The Boy From Oz  was the complete opposite. Though it marked the spectacular Broadway debut of Hugh Jackman the show itself was paper-thin.  Legs Diamond  was only briefly mentioned in The Boy from Oz.

By all rights this hopelessly bad musical about a guy who may or may not jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in order to win a bet should have been swept into the dustbin of Broadway refuge. It was a bad show, but not memorably bad. Everything about this Moose Charlap-Eddie Lawrence one performance bomb was forgettable, the book, the score, the performances, everything!  

So why is Kelly  so well remembered?

Well, first of all, along with the chorus of pans that followed its simultaneous opening and closing night, The New York Times also reported that Kelly  lost a then-record $650,000, a helluva lot of money in those days. Then came a Saturday Evening Post article by Lewis H. Lapham that gave people beyond Shubert Alley a look at the gory details that went on during the making of this hopeless opus. For many, many years thereafter, Kelly was the flop in which all flops were measured. This really wasn’t fair because Kelly was so, well, forgettable.