The Great White Way has seen its spectacular successes over the years. We are still humming the tunes from Broadway musicals such as Showboat, Camelot, The Music Man, Annie, and Phantom of the Opera. (On request, I believe I could produce creditable renditions of most of the songs from Finian’s Rainbow.) Comedies such as The Producers or Barefoot in the Park and dramas such as Death of a Salesman, Come From Away and Amadeus are the stuff of legends.
Legendary too are the great flops – shows that were badly-cast, ill-conceived, overly-ambitious, or just too expensive to stage. Rockabye Hamlet, for example; a 1976 attempt to put the Prince of Denmark to music with lines such as this piece of advice from Polonius to Laertes: “Good son, you return to France/Keep your divinity inside your pants.” It lasted 7 performances, which is two more than Carrie: the Musical managed to stage in 1988. Apparently there was less of an audience for pig’s blood showers than the producers anticipated.
Fancy a dramatic investigation of the Shroud of Turin? Into the Light was turned off after six performances in 1986. The Broadway version of the Odyssey, entitled (wait for it) Home Sweet Homer, starring Yul Brynner closed after a single show – the producers had wanted to avoid putting it on altogether but Brynner’s contract stipulated that at least one performance was required. Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark might have continued had not the production cost $75 million before opening and requiring $1,000,000 a week to keep the lights on.
But when Broadway mavens gather around the campfire and tell chilling stories about truly desperately bad shows, talk always turns to The Moose Murders, a “mystery farce” which opened (and closed) on this day in 1983. Trapped by a storm in a wilderness lodge, the characters play a murder mystery game. Killings, flaccid slapstick, failed gags, incest, and a kick in the groin to a man in a moose costume made for a deathly silence from the audience and a closing after the first night. Movie and radio legend Eve Arden was to star but withdrew when it became obvious she could no longer memorize lines. (She did send a gracious note to the cast.)
Critics were not kind. It has been called “the golden standard of awfulness against which all theatre is judged.” The New York Times writer Frank Rich said it was “the worst play I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage”. In fact, in a magazine’s list of Great Disasters of the Twentieth Century the play ranked Number Five (just behind New Coke). The play’s author Arthur Bicknell did manage to make a bit of money from it by penning Moose Murdered, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Broadway Bomb.