Wait, this was real? Am I being wooshed or was this just a joke on the Simpsons?
Draelin , I thought the EXACT same thing when this play came out. Bah, it amazes me, it really does!
While technically not a Broadway musical, both the writer/director and main star had hopes of heading that direction according to later interviews.
It was that classical movie musical At Long Last Love written and directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepard, Madeline Kahn with Eileen Brennan, John Hillerman, Mildred Natwick and M. Emmet Walsh.
I have seen interviews in which both Bogdanovich and Reynolds say it is the worst piece of do do they have ever done done (and remember one of the individuals admitting this is Burt Reynolds and he do know do do). I believe Shepard said it was just a part of her life she would like to forget.
I have seen this film, and honestly, it is like watching a train wreck without the entertainment value. If you do find a copy of this to watch, do not do so without major amounts of medication.
TV
Ah, 1776- “Till Then” is one of my favorite love songs of any genre, and it’s composed completely of actual lines taken from John & Abigail Adams letters (though rearranged for meter and rhyme). In fact there’s hardly a misfire in the whole piece.
Movie Musicals that should never have been made are really easy:
Man of La Mancha- truly dreadful screen adaptation even though the acting talent was certainly there. You’d think it would have worked- the film let’s you see Don Quixote as he sees himself in parts, but it doesn’t.
Mame- it’s everybody’s favorite wacky redhead as everybody’s favorite wacky aunt- and it sucks! Jane Connelly, Bea Arthur (both from the B’way cast) and Robert Preston do what they can to redeem it but it just doesn’t work.
Disney’s ANNIE- I’ve no idea what they were thinking- the movie had already been done once, Kathy Bates is a great actress but isn’t 1/20th the comedienne that Carol Burnett is, and in the new version Daddy Warbucks goes from “get that orphan out of here” to “I need you with me forever” so quickly that it’s creepy. Even Allan Cummings was unable to salvage much.
Stage Musicals I’ve never seen but from what I’ve read shouldn’t have been made:
Onward Victoria- a musical about the life and times of Victoria Claflin Woodhull (free love advocate, psychic medium, huckster extraordinaire and the first woman to run for president) that closed after on performance.
Annie Warbucks- the long unawaited sequel to Annie which also tanked.
Mack & Mabel- the soundtrack has some wonderful (and some not wonderful) moments but the book was evidently a big mess (though it’s recently been rewritten and is about to be revived [have they ever revived a show that originally tanked I wonder?]
Chess- has some great music and the soundtrack is one of my favorites, but I understand that the version that opened onstage was waaaaay too splashy and glittery and overproduced.
Home Sweet Homer, mentioned above, was a star vehicle for Yul Brynner who was trying to get out of his King & I golden handcuffs, and it didn’t work.
You mean is the musical real? Yep. The most famous song from it is probably “They Call the Wind Maria.”
If that’s not what you meant, er, ignore me!
Oh, and Taboo is one of the most major flops from recent years, costing producer Rosie O’Donnell millions and millions because she wouldn’t close in rehearsals or after the disastrous opening. Oddly, it was a big hit in London.
In addition to Streetcar: the Opera, there is an operatic version of Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking which would also seem unsingable. (Maybe with a jaunty ditty by some prison rapists for comic relief and an end number where the nun throws off her habit and goes into a more cloistered version of ‘Rose’s Turn’ {“Hello boys! I’m Sister Helen! What’s- your- name? You’ll be jailed, you’ll be gased/you’re gonna pay for your sins on your ass!/Starting here, starting now, the appeals process is clogging up dockets…”}
Anticipating that some Broadway maven will eventually come in and mention The Capeman, I’ll do it. I saw it in previews (it had 59 previews because of bad reception and rewrites and things, I guess, and only 68 performances). My brother and I liked it. In particular I liked Paul Simon’s music, which makes sense because I like what I’ve heard of Paul Simon’s stuff and I don’t like typical musicals and typical musical music, because I think sucks. Much of the score had a Latin flair. The show may or may not have been any good, I don’t know. I do know it got a ton of bad press because the production was accused of glorifying a murderer, Salvador Agron. I don’t remember enough of it to say if I felt it did that or not. Could be true.
If there’s nothing else memorable about the show, how about this: the young Salvador was played by this guy named Marc Anthony, and the adult Salvador was Ruben Blades.
Gotta agree with this one. I love MOLM as a musical, but whjose idea was it to get Peter O’Toole and Sophia Lotren to play the lead roles? Neither is known as a musical performer, and the original stars of the stage version – Richard Kiley and Joan Diener – were both available (although not, perhaps, as “bankable”). A major disa[ppointment.
One has to add The Wiz as a bad adaptation, too, mainly because the makers apparently felt the moviegoping public wouldn’t see it unless they had a “name” playing Dorothy. So we got the play rewritten to replace a kid with a grown-up as Dorothy.
And don’t get me started on the movie version of Camelot…
Slight hijack: I was watching an interview with Daniel Davis (best known as the wisecracking British butler Niles on The Nanny [though he’s actually from Arkansas) who is starring in the current revival of La Cage Aux Folles (next door to where the show’s writer Harvey Fierstein is playing Tevye). He mentioned the problems in that revival: 20 years ago the prospect of two openly gay men living in a marriage style relationship and raising a son was so shocking it had to be downplayed, but now it’s like a Law & Order “ripped from today’s headlines” moment that needs to be downplayed so as not to detract from the comedy of the piece. Either way, the show has a lot more balls than that Robin Williams/Nathan Lane piece of gutlessness (that goes out of its way to downplay any real sentiment twixt the couple and makes Lane’s character less of a co-parent than just somebody in the same house).
What about Jerry Springer:The Musical?
That’s surely a contender, if you were to pay any attention to the hordes of people who complained when the screened it a while ago.
Richard Farina: A Long Time Coming Starring a young Richard Gere, no less.
I believe that’s Jerry Springer: The Opera. [/nitpick]
I’m not sure if it ever played anywhere except Atlanta, but “Watergate: A Musical”, starring Gene Barry as Nixon, falls into the “what were they thinking??” category!
Yup, you’re right.
Pardon me.
I’ve thought for years that a singing Richard Nixon was one of the funniest ideas on Earth. In fact I remember writing a duet for Nixon and Kissinger some time ago, modeled on your standard Broadway romantic duet.
Haha. You beat me to it. Did you get a chance to go see this? I didn’t, but secured a CD of one of the performances. It’s pretty clear why it closed as quickly as it did. It’s kind of like one of those trainwreck threads here that you just know are going to end badly, and you can’t help but watch it go up in flames.
<i>Garlick, garlick, it’s why we’re so well-hung!</i>
Blasphamy!
I’ve give a finger to see that performed.
(Well, maybe not my index finger or thumb, and definatly not the middle finger, but one of the ones next to the pinky should do it. What are those called?).
But my point still stands.
I sawit twice and made a CD of it myself. The show ran for 178 performances, which was 177 too many. People kept going back because they couldn’t believe how bad it was. I wish they’d let Steve Barton do the English version–he became a superstar in Germany with “Tanz der Vampyr.”
Crawford has been replaced in ALW’s “Woman in White” by Michael Ball, who is getting much better reviews. I doubt that WIW is going to be “Michael Crawford’s triumphant return to Broadway”
Heh. Michael Crawford was an embarrasment to himself in Dance of the Vampires. The only person who ought to have been more embarrased than him was Jim Steinman, who’s pathetic rehashing of his old hits for Meatloaf et al was more of a joke than anything else (as a Meatloaf fan, I can tell you that basically every theme and every melody from that show comes right of of a Meatloaf song, except of course for Total Eclipse of the Heart… shudder)
Then you want to see the opera “Nixon in China”, which actually got some good reviews. It’s got a singing Nixon and a singing Kissenger.