Composer Frank Wildhorn is a bit of an anomaly on Broadway. So far he’s written the music for six different Broadway shows. And while his first musical Jekle & Hyde ran for three years, not a single show of his closed in the black (including the unnecessary 2013 revival of Jekle & Hyde).  

One problem with Mr. Wildhorn might be his classics illustrated approach to show writing. Having written shows based on Dracula, The Scarlet Pimpernale, Bonnie and Clyde and Frankenstein (the later produced in regional theaters) you have to wonder if this guy is capable of thinking outside of the box? It’s also hard to pick a biggest flop out of the bunch, but the 2011 flop Wonderland can’t help but stand out.

As was typical of Wildhorn, he first recorded a concept album. The show then had it’s premier in Tampa in 2009. It looked like it could have a life in regional theaters, but the producers decided instead to bring the show to Broadway.

Rather then sticking to the Lewis Carroll original, Wonderland centered on a grown up Alice living in Queens. Her daughter Chloe ends up following the rabbit to Wonderland, and Alice has to go and save her daughter from the weirdoes down that rabbit hole.

The fact that Tim Burton’s hugely successful film version of Alice in Wonderland had been released earlier that year didn’t help. Neither did the fact that the film version also had a grown up Alice returning to Wonderland. The songs sounded generic and the costumes looked like they were picked up at a Wicked yard sale. Critics cried “off with it’s head” and the tea party was packed up after less then a month. But like many of Wildhorn’s shows, Wonderland has found some life in regional theaters.

Composer Burton Lane was something akin to the Stanley Kubrick of Broadway, a huge talent but one who’s repertoire is far heavier on quality than quantity.  His career started at just fourteen when some songs of his appeared in The Greenwich Village Follies.  Though he spent much of his time in Hollywood, Lane also wrote the scores for Hold Onto Your Hats in 1940 and Laughing Room Only in ’44.  

The show that established him as a major composer was Finnian’s Rainbow, a musical fantasy that mixed social commentary with whimsy. Introducing the world to such chestnuts as “Look to the Rainbow,” “That Old Devil Moon” and “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” Finnian’s Rainbow went on to be one of the American Theaters most beloved musicals.  A full eighteen years passed before he teamed up with Alan Jay Lerner for a follow-up.  On A Clear Day You Can See Forever may have been marred by a convoluted book but it once again had a glorious score. Fourteen more years passed before his final show opened on Broadway.

For Carmelinia, Lane reunited with Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the book with Fiddler on the Roof’s Joseph Stein.   The show was an adaptation of the 1968 film Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell and starred Georgia Brown, best known for playing Nancy in Oliver!, as an Italian woman raising her teenage daughter.  She told the girl that her father died in World War II but in truth she had affairs with three different men and doesn’t know which one is the father.  Trouble ensues when the three veterans visit the small Italian village where mother and daughter live.

If the plot sounds familiar to you, don’t be surprised.  A virtually identical plot was used for Mama Mia!.  Carmelina certainly took it’s story more seriously and while ABBA isn’t everyone’s cup of Absolute Vodka it was pretty hard not to get swept up in Lane and Lerner’s often beautiful score.  Yet while Mama Mia! compiled a run of 5,773 performances on Broadway alone, Carmelina eeked out just 17, a perfect example of how the line between hit and flop can sometimes be paper thin.

Lots has changed on Broadway in the last quarter century and one of the biggest has been the presence of The Walt Disney Company.  They first dipped their toe into the chilly waters of Broadway in 1994 with a stage version of their animated hit Beauty and the Beast.  The show exceeded everyone’s expectations and ran for thirteen years!  Next came The Lion King in 1997.  This show conquered even the biggest Disney bigot and recieved rave reviews, won the Tony Award and has been running ever since.  Third time was the charm with Aida, their first (and thus far only) musical not culled from their film library. It may not have been quite as successful as the first two ventures but at a run totaling four and a half years who’s complaining?  Four years would pass before they had a new show open, and this time audiences didn’t go (ahem) ape over it.

Tarzan was based on Disney’s 1999 animated film, which was itself based on Edgar Rice Boroughs stories about Tarzan of Graystoke (Josh Strickland) who is orphaned in the jungle as an infant and raised by gorillas.  Things are complicated when he meets and falls in love with a young female scientist named Jane (Jenn Gambatese).

For the stage version playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) adapted the book and Phil Collins, who won an Oscar for writing the songs for the animated film, greatly expanded his score.  Set and costume designer Bob Crowley performed the same two disciplines on Tarzan as well as directing the production.  He designed a stunning set that created the illusion of a vast and endless jungle while employing mountain climbing equipment to simulate Tarzan and his simian brethren swinging from the trees.

Due to the complexities of the production, Tarzan was the first Disney musical not to have an out-of-town tryout.  It opened to mostly negative reviews and frankly the show was basically The Lion King II, frequently using puppet techniques to bring the jungle fauna to life.  There were some stunning moments, particularly the simulated shipwreck at the shows open.  It was also refreshing to see Tarzan portrayed as a more complex character whose vocabulary extended beyond the “me, Tarzan.  You Jane” of the Johnny Weissmuller films.   Audiences couldn’t quite get into the swing of things and after 486 performances Tarzan closed as Disney’s first financial failure (though as we’ll see, not their last).  But as in Disney’s many animated films, things had a happy ending.  They had already opened Mary Poppins in London and that November it opened on Broadway to great success.  Tarzan meanwhile has had successful productions mounted in the Netherlands, Sweden, The Philippines, Germany and has been licensed to armature theater groups around the country.

Over the years Broadway has had its share of one-hit-wonders (and lord knows it’s better to be a one-hit-wonder than a no-hit-wonder).  Two people that fall into that category are Mitch Leigh, who wrote the stirring score to Man of La Mancha but never again succeeded in having another hit.  Another was Yul Brynner, who dazzled audiences in The King and I, a role he would play 4,625 during the shows original run, on tour and during two Broadway revivals. He also played the King on film (and won an Oscar) and even on a short-lived TV version of The King and I.  While he went on to enjoy great success in the movies, appearing in such films as The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven and Westworld, Brynner never played another role on Broadway except for Odysseus in the notorious flop Home Sweet Homer.

The show was essentially a re-telling of Homers Odyssey. Albert Marre, who had directed La Mancha was reunited with Leigh and also co-wrote the book with Roland Kibbee.  Stories circulated about Brynner’s outrageous contract demands, including that his dressing room be painted a certain color and that his refrigerator be stocked only with white eggs, absolutely no brown ones.  Trouble also ensued with Brynner, Marre, his wife and Brynners co-star Joan Diener and Brynners wife Jaqueline all got food poisoning and attempted to sue Trader Vic’s for $7.5 million for serving them “poisonous” short ribs.

The show played a multi-city tour before going to Broadway and received scathing reviews in each town it played.  The producers rather understandably wanted to cancel the Broadway engagement but Brynner threatened to sue if the show wasn’t brought to Broadway.  Knowing that the show was going to get panned once again (and it did), Home Sweet Homer opened and closed on the same night and before you could say “Ectcedera,” Brynner was back in a touring production of The King and I.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that over the years writers have tried to option the rights to turn one of Woody Allen’s many films into a musical, only to be turned down by the Woodman.  He did, however, become intrigued when Marvin Hamlisch and Craig Carnelia approached him about turning his 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway into a stage musical.  But when Allen first heard the songs he became disenchanted.  His sister and producer Letty Aronson then suggested that he use period songs from the twenties instead of original tunes. This appealed to Allen and he agreed.

Susan Stroman was hired to direct and choreograph the show, no doubt hoping to repeat the same alchemy that made The Producers a smash.  It even opened in the same St. James Theater. A very impressive cast was assembled that included Zach Braff, Brooks Ashmanskas, Karen Ziemba and the late-great Marin Mazzie. In the end though, Bullets Over Broadway came across as a cut-and-paste job with period songs like “Let’s Misbehave” and “Good Old New York” shoehorned into a book that largely just rehashed the movie.  The fact that Allen just handed in the script and let Stroman take it from there shows that this wasn’t a true collaborative effort and in the end it showed.  Bullets Over Broadway received very mixed reviews and ran out of ammunition after 156 rounds were fired.

Hollywood may dominate the multiplexes of the world but the country that puts out the most movies per year is India, with Nigeria now in second place.  And the most popular genre to come out of India is the Bollywood Movie Musical.  They might seem odd to Western audiences but they have developed a cult following in the U.K. and the U.S.  What better way to bring them to the masses than with a big, splashy Broadway musical?

It was Andrew Lloyd Webber who conceived of the idea of Bombay Dreams and while he produced the shows West End premiere he opted to leave the writing of the score to A.R. Rahman, the insanely prolific composer of many a beloved Bollywood Movie and later an Oscar winner for scoring Slumdog Millionaire.  The show did quite well in London where it managed to run for two years.  But would Broadway audiences take to it?

Well, not really.  The show received unenthusiastic reviews and ended up having a rather forced run of 284 performances, not nearly long enough to turn a profit.  No doubt the producers were hoping that the many tourists from India that visit New York each year would come see the show, but alas they didn’t.  Still, Bombay Dreams was a spectacular production and it deserves credit for being something different in the made-to-order world of mainstream Broadway.

“Where were you when we needed you?” asked Pearl Baily at the 165^thand final performance of her musical House of Flowers.  Based on a short story by Truman Capote, House of Flowers centered on the rivalry between two competing bordellos in Haiti and a young woman named Otelli who turns down the chance to marry a rich lord but instead opts to marry a poor villager. 

Visually, the show was stunning and the score – with music by Harold Arlen and both Arlen and Capote writing the lyrics – was also beautiful.  It included such songs as “A Sleeping Bee,” “I Never Has Seen Snow,” “Two Ladies in Da Shade of Da Banana Tree” and others.  Arlen gave the show a rich carribean sound and the show was the first in Broadway history to incorporate a steel drum into it’s orchestra. Finally, the show had an incredible cast of actors, some of whom would go on to achieve stardom in the future.  Supporting Ms. Baily (who played the Madam of one of the bordellos) were Diahann Carroll as Otelli and also Juanita Hall, Ray Walston, Geoffrey Holder and even future dance legend Alvin Ailey.  Alas, even with all this going for it, House of Flowers was not well received by the critics and didn’t achieve enough word-of-mouth to sell tickets, at least not until it was announced that it would close.

Luckily a cast recording kept the show alive.  In 1968 there was an Off-Broadway revival at the Theater De Lys in Greenwich Village and in 2003 City Center’s Encores! Series presented a highly acclaimed concert production.

In 1954 a team of young songwitters named Richard Adler and Jerry Ross became the toast of Broadway after they were recommended by their mentor Frank Loesser to write the score for a new Broadway musical called The Pajama Game.  The show became a smash hit and the duo won a Tony Award for writing it.  Next they hit another home run with Damn Yankees.  Clearly, the team was on fire but alas, their happiness would be short lived.  Not long after Damn Yankees opened Jerry Ross was diagnosed with lukimia.  He died shortly thereafter.

Rather than teaming up with a new partner, Adler decided to write his next show himself (unlike most songwriting teams where one writes the music and another the lyrics, Adler and Ross both shared music and lyric credit).  Teaming up with libbretist Robert Alan Arthur, Adler conceived Kwanina specifically for his new wife Sally Anne Howes. The show centered on the son of a tribal chief named Kwamina (Terry Carter) who returns to his village after studying medicine in London.  He finds the ancient ways of his tribe to be antiquated.  He also finds himself at odds with a young missionary (Howes) who he eventually falls in love with.

Kwamina received mostly negative reviews and folded after 32 performances.  A cast recording was released and the score was often quite beguiling.  According to Adler the real reason why the show failed is because audiences were uncomfortable with a black man marrying a white woman.  They were, however, willing to accept a black woman falling in love with a white man in Richard Rogers’ No Strings which opened shortly thereafter.  Adler might’ve had a point.

In his long and illustrious career Harold Prince has produced and/or directed some of the greatest shows Broadway has ever seen, including such classics as The Pajama Game, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Company, Follies, Sweeny Todd, The Phantom of the Opera and many, many more. One big element to his success is his willingness to not only take on risky projects, but also to occasionally fail with such projects. A perfect case in point was A Doll’s Life.

It was Betty Comden and Adolph Green, usually known for less esoteric fare, who conceived of this musical sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Prince teamed Comden and Green up with composer Larry Grossman, composer of Minnie’s Boys and Goodtime Charlie. Though Prince provided the show with ravishing stage pictures that foreshadowed his glorious work on The Phantom of the Opera, A Doll’s Life succeeded in turning Ibsen’s heroine Nora (Betsy Joslyn) into a symbol rather then a flesh and blood character. The show received terrible reviews and lasted only 5 performances. Harold Prince would live to fight another day.

Thirty-five years later playwright Lucas Hnath took a stab at continuing Ibsen’s drama with a straight play called A Doll’s House, Part II.  It opened on Broadway and was both a critical and commercial success.  You never know.

Did anyone want to see a jukebox musical full of Jimmy Buffett tunes?  Did Jimmy Buffet even write enough good songs to make a jukebox musical?