In 1985 the Parisian lyricist-composer team of Alain Boubil and Claude Michel Schonberg hit the musical theater jackpot when Cameron Mackintosh nurtured and produced the English language production Les Miserables in London. The production continues to run in the West End to this day and went on to become a worldwide blockbuster. They next scored a smash hit with Miss Saigon, which ran ten years in both London and New York and enjoyed great success all over the world.  Martin Guerre, their third Mackintosh collaboration didn’t quite click but thanks to Sir Cameron’s generous patronage it’s had a number of smaller scale productions on both sides of the pond.

In 2007 the Franco-Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote their first English-language show not produced by Sir Mackintosh and their first show ever to premiere in the U.S.

Moya Doherty and John McColgan, producers of the Celtic clogdancing spectacle Riverdance, commissioned The Pirate Queen. The show was based on the life of Grace (Grania) O’Malley, an Irish tribal leader who refused to fall prey to the British crown. An interesting enough story, but one that did not gel with producers trademark riverglitz. During a troubled out-of-town tryout Richard Maltby, Jr. (who co-wrote the English lyrics for Miss Saigon) took over for director Frank Galati (who was also replaced on The Seussical) during the Chicago tryout. Didn’t help much. Critics made The Pirate Queen walk the plank and the show only ran for 85 performances at the flop prone Hilton Theater (now the Lyric Theater).  

There was, however, one aspect of the show that everyone agreed was excellent. And that was leading lady Stephanie J. Block. Despite having played Elphaba in several of the Wicked workshops, she was not asked to originate the role when it came to Broadway (she would play the role later on in that shows run). After appearing in 9 to 5 and revivals of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Falsettos, Ms. Block won a Tony award last season for The Cher Show.

……Galt MacDermot’s next musical began previews two weeks later.Via Galactica was an outer space themed show set on a meteor three thousand years into the future. A suddenly unemployed Ralph Carter joined the cast. So did a young Raul Julia (star of MacDermot’s far superior The Two Gentlemen of Verona) and a young Irene Carra. Peter Hall directed the extravaganza, which featured a levitating spaceship, laser beams and trampolines used to simulate weightlessness. Interesting, but that couldn’t compensate for a libretto by that was every bit as incomprehensible as Dude’s.  Via Galactica ran for a week before it was sucked into the black hole of Broadway flops.

P.S. Via Galactica was the first show to play at The Gershwin Theater, which in those days was called The Uris Theater. The show was originally titled UP! until the producers realized that the marquee would thus read UP! Uris.

“You, sit down and suffer with the rest of us!” So yelled librettist Gerome Ragni at one of the final performances of Dude, quite possibly the most pretentious and incomprehensible evening Broadway has ever seen.

Ragni had written the book and lyrics, and also starred in the Broadway sensation Hair. While Hair may have had its share of pretention and incomprehension, it was also lots of fun and beautifully captured the spirit of the times (and continues to delight audiences to this day). Ragni reunited with his Hair composer Galt MacDermot, but not his co-librettist James Rado (supposedly they had a falling out). Producers Peter and Adella Holitzer (the later would latter go to jail for bilking investors) agreed to produce the show despite the fact that Ragni initially turned in a libretto that ran for over a thousand pages.

Due to the environmental staging of the show, the Broadway Theater was gutted and turned into a theater-in-the-round. Dirt was brought onto the stage for one scene but spread dust everywhere. When water was sprayed on the dirt to prevent the dust, the stage became a muddy mess.

During the previews 23-year old Caucasian Kevin Greer, the actor originally cast as the motorcycle ridding “Dude” (an everyman meant to represent every human being on earth) was replaced by eleven year old African American actor Ralph Carter (later to play Michael on the sit-com Good Times). Since some of his lyrics were pretty adult, a second actor playing “Big Dude” was added. Dude made his entrance crawling out from between his mothers’ legs. At least Ragni’s request to have a thousand butterflies released during every performance was denied.

Just what the hell Dude was supposed to be about is anyone’s guess (if Ragni knew we can’t ask him. He passed away in 1991). The show ran for two weeks and marked a low point for Broadway professionalism, at least until……..

You would think after the debacle of Bring Back Birdie that composer Charles Strouse would have avoided doing another sequel like the plague. But when his Annie lyricist-director Martin Charnin announced a sequel to that hit show on the closing night of its long Broadway run, Strouse was happy to sign on. So were librettist Thomas Meehan, set designer David Mitchell, choreographer Peter Gennero and original Miss Hannigan Dorothy Loudon. Seeing as how the show was subtitled Miss Hannigan’s Revenge it was clear that this juicy roll was going to be even juicier the second time around. But in almost every way, centering the show on Miss Hannigan’s revenge was a recipe for disaster.

This sequel had mean old Miss Hannigan breaking out of prison just as a female Senator threatens to take Annie away from Daddy Warbucks unless he finds a suitable mother for his adopted daughter (if you’re a fan of Annie you’re probably wondering why he didn’t just marry his beloved secretary Grace and why the richest man in the world would let a Senator push him around? So did the audience). Miss Hannigan, with the help of her flaming hairdressing brother disguises Hannigan as his perfect mate, a southern belle named Charlotte O’Hara. Then they replace Annie with a doppelganger in order to assure that she’s chosen as the ideal Mom (If you’re wondering why Daddy Warbucks wouldn’t recognize his own daughter…ah, you get the idea).

From the first preview of the Washington tryout it was clear that this show really, really sucked. Original producer Mike Nichols and Tommy Tune came to down to Washington to try to fix the show but to no avail. Annie 2 was mercifully put to rest in D.C.

But in true Annie fasion, the creators would stick out their chin, and grin and…perform major surgery.  

A year later a drastically scaled down show opened at The Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut (where Annie had its world premiere in 1977). A tremendous amount of work was done (and Miss Hannigan was dropped) before the re-titled Annie Warbucks opened Off-Broadway at the Variety Arts Theater where it ran for 200 performances, won the Outer Critics Circle award for Best Off-Broadway musical, and has found a home in youth theaters tired of just doing the original Annie. Still, unlike the Annie comic strip, Annie the musical should have ended on the final panel.

If there’s one overriding theme on this list it’s that even the most talented people fail. It’s their ability to “Pick yourself up/dust yourself off/start all over again” – to paraphrase a Dorothy Fields lyric, that separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls. One prime example is five-time Tony winner Angela Lansbury.

After making her musical theater debut in Anyone Can Whistle you might think she would have high tailed it out of New York and got the first plane back to California. Nope.  She took voice lessons and ended up becoming the toast of the Great White way in Mame. She then starred in Jerry Herman’s next musical Dear World. It wasn’t a hit but she won her second Tony Award. She won her third and fourth Toys for a 1974 revival of Gypsy and Sweeny Todd (her fifth would come in 2009 for a revival of Noel CowardsBlithe Spirit). But prior to those triumphs she starred in Prettybelle, a truly bizarre musical that folded in Boston.

Based on a Jean Arnold novel of the same name, Prettybelle told the story of Southern woman who was married to an abusive bigot. To atone for her husband’s mistreatment of blacks she allows herself be raped by a group of black men before falling in love with a liberal-Mason lawyer. The town eventually turns against her and she’s (somewhat justifiably) committed to an asylum.  

Who in their right mind was responsible for so nutty a premise? Would you believe a team of top Broadway professionals that included book writer Michael Stewart, composer Jule Styne, lyricist Bob Merrill and choreographer-director Gower Champion (producer Alexander Cohen was also a seasoned pro who had produced many hit plays but always had trouble when it came to musicals)? Everyone involved believed that they were doing something unique and daring and in some ways they were. The subject matter may have been too unpleasant for a large audience, but the show had its admirers. Ask almost anyone who caught the show in Boston, and they’ll tell you that Angela Lansbury gave the performance of her career. Eleven years later the cast was re-assembled, and an album was recorded. It quickly became a hit with show freaks and remains in print to this day.

In the 1988 movie Big Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia meet at FAO Schwarz and begin an impromptu rendition of “Heart and Soul” on an oversized piano keyboard. The scene became an instant classic, largely because of the spontaneity and intimacy of the scene. But did it call out to be blown up into a great big production number?

Well, the producers of Big: The Musical  thought so and they assembled a crack team of Broadway pros to bring this $10 million musical to the stage. They included librettist John Weidman (Pacific Overtures, Assassins), songwriters David Shire and Richard Maltby, Jr. (Starting Here, Starting Now, Baby), director Michael Ockrent (Me and My Girl, Crazy for You) and choreographer Susan Stroman (Crazy for You, the Harold Prince production of Show Boat). It probably wasn’t wise to invite FAO Schwarz to invest in the show and receive billing as a co-producer. That kind of thing leads to bad press.

The musical that opened on Broadway came across like an overblown toy commercial, some good dancing and performances notwithstanding. The show actually did get a favorable notice in the Times, but other reviewers weren’t so kind. Big had the misfortune of opening in the wake of Julie Andrews’s comeback vehicle Victor/Victoria and the sleeper hits Rent  and Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk.  With no Tony Award wins, Big closed in less than six months and lost its entire investment. Shortly after Big’s closing, the L.A. Times theater correspondent Barbara Isenberg published Making it Big, a behind the scenes look at the fiasco.

But making it big is pretty much what the show ended up doing. A re-written, re-staged (by Eric D. Shaffer) and mercifully scaled down touring production was warmly received by critics and audiences. Big was soon licensed and has gone on to become a youth theater staple.

Between 1955 and 1980 impresario David Merrick produced over eighty plays and musicals on Broadway. The majority of them were hits. But along the way he did have a few doozies. One particularly distressing failure was Mata Hari, one of the most legendary shows to close on the road.

To direct this Jerome Coopersmith (Book) – Edward Thomas (Music) – Martin Charnin (Lyrics) World War I spy musical Merrick recruited Vincent Minnelli. While Minnelli was the undisputed king of the movie musical, he hadn’t directed a Broadway show since the 1939 Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein flop Very Warm for May in 1939. It was soon clear that his theater skills were rusty. He also insisted on casting the ravishing Marisa Mell as the title character. Though long on looks she was unfortunately short on talent and stage experience.

The first preview in Washington, D.C. is the stuff of legend. Scenery collapsed, lighting cues were off, and the lights caught a nearly nude Marisa Mell during a costume change. Lady Bird Johnson sponsored the evening and popular opinion about the Vietnam War had not yet shifted, at least not in Washington. Therefore, the anti-war number “Maman” didn’t go over well. But the most notorious moment came at the very end. After being shot by a firing squad, Ms. Mell broke character and scratched her nose before the lights went out.

Normally David Merrick was known to fire people for no particular reason. Yet he didn’t fire Minnelli or Mell. Lord knows why? Mata Hari folded in Washington. Like her namesake Mata Hari’s legend lives on.

In the wake of Hair’s phenomenal success Broadway was assaulted with an endless stream of rock musicals. Some like Jesus Christ Superstar and The Two Gentlemen of Verona were good. Many others like Billy, Soon, Via Galactaca, The Lieutenant and about a dozen or so others were not. A rather late but significant offender was Rockabye Hamlet, a rock musical written by Cliff Jones (what, you never heard of him?) that was originally written for Canadian radio.

Broadway vet Gower Champion (Bye Bye Birdie, Carnival, Hello Dolly!, I Do, I Do) was hired to direct this musical masquerading as a rock concert. He was clearly out of his element. Then again, what was he supposed to do with a song list that included “He Got It In The Ear”, “The Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Boogie” and “The Wart Song”? Nothing in Denmark could have possibly been this rotten and Rockabye Hamlet closed after seven performances. On the plus side, the show did have a young Beverly D’Angelo as Ophelia (who strangles herself with her microphone cord) and a post  Rocky Horror pre-Bat Out Of Hell Meatloaf as a priest.

“Why see Rocky on Broadway?  Because I said so.”  So said Sylvester Stallone in a commercial for Rocky: Broadway.  It’s not like he ever wanted us to see a bad movie of his, right?

When Sylvester Stallone first played Rocky Balboa way back in 1976, it was a true Cinderella story both on-screen and off, as Stallone wrote the screenplay to Rocky and turned down a big payday in order to play the title character.  The end result was a smash hit that catapulted Stallone to stardom.  After that Rocky became his Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card, lacing up his boxing gloves whenever his career hit a rough patch.  And boy has it ever hit some rough patches.  By the 2000’s Stallone was still playing Balboa in Rocky Balboa (2006) and would later nab an Oscar nomination – his first since playing the role in 1976 – for the 2015 movie Creed.  But old Sly Stallone should have learned from Rhinestone to avoid musicals, yet he charged ahead with turning Rocky into one, co-writing the book with the always reliable Thomas Meehan (Annie, The Producers, Hairspray) and co-producing the show.  Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens were put in charge of writing the score, with songs from the movies like “Eye of the Tiger” and “Gonna Fly Now” wedged in.  Alex Timbers directed.

Rocky premiered in Hamburg in 2012 where it received rave reviews.  Since the Germans never liked anything that was bad it was decided to go ahead with a planned Broadway production.  With Andy Karl as Rocky and Margo Seibert as Adrian, Rocky Broadway (as it was billed for the Great White Way) opened to mixed reviews and sluggish box office.  Though Karl received a Tony nomination for his performance and while Christopher Barreca’s needlessly elaborate sets won a Tony Award (a boxing ring actually slid out over the orchestra seats.  Those sitting in the “golden circle” were escorted onstage to sit on bleachers), Rocky was K.O’d after 188 rounds.

While the show undeniably had its redeeming qualities one has to ask the question, was it ever a good idea to have Rocky Balboa sing?  In the end, Rocky: Broadway was just another cash grab based on a popular movie and as is more often than not the case, it was more surprising fare like A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder  (which won that years Tony Award) and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical  that won over audiences rather than a paint-by-numbers production like Rocky.

Between 1907 and 1931 Florenz Ziegfeld produced twenty-one editions of his legendary Ziegfeld Follies, all of which were noted for their stellar headliners, knockout production values and chorus lines of beautiful girls. The Follies was, in an essence, the original mega-musical. Following Ziegfeld’s death his widow Billie Burke (Glinda in The Wizard of Oz) produced three new editions in 1934, 1936, and 1943 with Sam and Lee Shubert. They had decent runs though they clearly lacked the Ziegfeld touch.

In 1956 producers Mark Kroll and Charles Conway optioned the rights to the Ziegfeld Follies name. They produced an edition in 1956 that starred Tallulah Bankhead, Carol Haney, Bea Arthur, and Julie Newmar. It closed in Boston and should have ended there.

Be that as it may Kroll and Conway brought The Ziegfeld Follies of 1957 to the Winter Garden with original Ziegfeld legend Beatrice Lillie in the lead. She and dancer Harold Lang proved to be the only aspect of the show that was worthy of the Ziegfeld name. The shoddy sets were recycled from the previous production and the chorus line consisted of only eight girls. This cut-rate edition of the Ziegfeld Follies closed after 123 performances, thus closing book on America’s greatest annual revue.