A spectacular flop is as memorable as a big hit. Just ask Betty Buckley. I did. Buckley, whose place in musical theater history is assured from her roles in “Cats” and “Pippin,” recently traveled to New York from her ranch in Texas to see the first-ever revival in this city of the 1988 musical “Carrie,” which is widely viewed as the biggest flop in Broadway musical history, attracting lacerating reviews and lasting a total of just five regular performances.
“Carrie” is now being revived – or, really, revised – Off-Broadway, at the Lucille Lortel Theater.
Buckley played Carrie’s religiously fanatic mother in the original production, with actress Linzi Hateley as the picked-upon, blood-splattered high school girl who discovers she has supernatural powers. (Buckley had played Carrie’s kindly gym teacher in the movie 12 years earlier, which was based on a Stephen King story.)
So, I asked Betty Buckley on Twitter: How do you look back on the show?
“Don’t really look back too much,” she replied. But then she elaborated:
“It was a blast when we did it. Linzi Hateley and I did some kickass work with a great piece!
The show as a whole was directorially inconsistent and editing needed to happen. But it was gutsy, brave and ahead of its time.”
And there in a nutshell is the reason why there seems to be an urge to revisit old flops these days in New York theater. Every flop seems to have its fierce defenders, and not just the people who put it together.
“Carrie” hasn’t opened yet; that’s set to happen March 1. But this seems to the season to try to bring flops back from the dead.
Earlier this season, there was a Broadway revival of On A Clear Day, You Can See Forever , which lasted 280 regular performances after it opened on Broadway in 1965 with a wonderful score by Burton Lane, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and a bizarre plot involving a woman who, under a psychiatrist’s care, reveals her past lives. The revival, with that great Burton Lane music and some more Lane songs imported from the movie “Royal Holiday,” had a book completely rewritten by Peter Parnell. Now the hypnosis patient was a gay man, and his past life was a female nightclub singer from the 1940s – the role now played by two performers, rather than one (on Broadway, Barbara Harris; on film, Barbra Streisand.) The psychiatrist was now made the leading man, and played by Harry Connick Jr. This version did even worse than the original, opening in December and closing the following month, after 57 regular performances.
Also revived was Sondheim’s Follies, which was panned when it opened on Broadway in 1971 (by both New York Times critics: “exhausting…tedious…its extravaganzas have nothing to do with its pebble of a plot….ingenuity without inspiration”), and considered a flop even though it lasted more than a year. Its much-heralded revival, starring Bernadette Peters, Elaine Page and Jan Maxwell, was considered something of a hit even though it did not make a profit and had a limited run of only about four months.
This demonstrates that the stage is not science. Yes, it involves alchemy, but that’s not science, it’s magic.
What may be the most extreme example of a fighting flop is
Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, which lasted 16 days after it opened on Broadway in 1981, but has been revised and revived continually since then. This seems a particular project of Sondheim. As he writes in his first volume of lyrics, “Finishing The Hat,” he and book writer George Furth “kept tinkering until, in 1992, for a production in Leicester, England, we finally succeeded in fixing the show to our satisfaction, and when years later it was produced in London, others agreed: it won the Laurence Olivier Award as Best Musical of the Year.”
London, I don’t have to tell you, is not New York, and the efforts at rehabilitation -- at, if you will, stage status -- continue. “Merrily” has launched the new season of the Encores! season at City Center, a series that began in 1994 with the very aim of presenting old flops – although that’s not how they put it. Their mission was to present concert versions of “rarely heard” Broadway musicals, never more than three or four concerts over a single weekend. Some would argue that they’ve been too successful – their resurrection of the musical “Chicago” so wowed audiences (and producers) that it soon transferred to Broadway. The original production of “Chicago” on Broadway, opening in 1975, lasted about two years. The revival, opening in 1996, is still playing 15 years later.
Since then, the “concerts” at Encores! have evolved into something close to full productions, the producers often clearly hoping to repeat the magic. Other Broadway transfers of Encores! productions – Finian’s Rainbow – have not fared as well.
The hope for “Merrily” is clearly a smashing transfer back to Broadway and a vindicating Tony or two.
“Smash” could be said to be part of this trend. NBC broadcast the pilot of the new television series on February 6, but as part of its relentless promotion of the show presented the entire episode for weeks before on everything from iTunes to Youtube. The show, created and performed mostly by Broadway veterans, is a backstage story about a group of Broadway professionals trying to write an original Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe. There was just such a musical on Broadway. “Marilyn: An American Fable” lasted 17 performances after it opened in November, 1983. The fictional musical at the heart of “Smash” borrows only the subject, not the book or the score; otherwise, it would have had to be called “Flop,” which might not have gotten the ratings NBC would like.
Jonathan Mandell is native New Yorker and a theater critic. For up-to-the-minute New York theater news, views and reviews, follow him on his Twitter feed at @NewYorkTheater
Broadway World has designated @NewYorkTheater as one of the top theater Twitter feeds: “Talk about a tweeter who knows his Broadway stuff! From news to conversation-starters to commentary, he’s got it all.”
