Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century

How They Happened, When They Happened (And What We've Learned)

Stephen Purdy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367173319, 9780367173319
• eBook ISBN: 9780429509155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Decision Making

Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century offers a provocative and revealing historical narrative of a group of musicals that cost millions and that had spectacular potential...but bombed anyway.

Unlike similar books on the topic which have taken a more truncated approach to telling the fascinating stories of these shows, Stephen Purdy chooses instead to examine at length the production histories of these shows which are all bound together by a common thread. In this volume Purdy focuses the lens on several seemingly infallible theatre creatives that weren't destined to repeat their successes with the shows discussed in this volume.

As such, Purdy grounds the discussion by examining what the legendary creators of Les Miserables, pop superstar Elton John, wunderkind Julie Taymor and many others have in common besides being inspired storytellers of iconic Broadway musicals. The answer is that that also all created shows that, for one reason or a dozen, didn't find an audience. This particular volume shares the story of what can happen when formidable creative teams of sell-out musicals attempt to re-create their success but miss the mark.

This is an engaging book for students, practitioners and fans of musical theatre that contains thoughtful observations about luck and creative differences, botched adaptations and alienated audiences, all of which can determine the fate of a musical.

1

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

Opened June 14, 2011

Closed January 4, 2014

Never bite off more than you can reasonably chew.

Key dramatis personae

Julie Taymor, Director, Co-Book Writer: Celebrated film and theatre director of The Lion King and others and MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship winner.

Glen Berger, Book Writer: Playwright and Emmy Award–winning writer.

The Edge, Music and Lyrics: Singer/Songwriter of the Irish Rock Band U2.

Bono, Music and Lyrics: Lead Guitarist/Songwriter of the Irish Rock Band U2.

Michael Cohl, Producer: Concert promoter and theatrical producer who Fortune magazine once dubbed the “Howard Hughes of rock and roll.”

David Garfinkle, Producer: Entertainment lawyer turned theatrical producer.

Marvel Comics, Owner of the Spider-Man “brand.”

Philip William McKinley: Credited as “Creative Consultant” on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

Story-wise, Spider-Man is a shrill, insipid mess, a musical aimed squarely at a Cub Scout demographic. Looking at the sad results you’re compelled to wonder: Where did all those tens of millions go?

Peter Marks, Washington Post, February 7, 2011, on the occasion of the “fauxpening”

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

It was the pervasive, running joke that Broadway season. And the unfunniest. Who would be the next casualty of the calamitous technical foul-ups over at the Foxwoods Theatre and would it be, God forbid, worse next time than the last? The New York theatre community was incensed. Late night television shows were spoofing the show with no letup. New Yorker magazine lampooned the show’s misfortunes by running a cover cartoon depicting a hospital ward of recuperating Spideys. Tony Award–winner Alice Ripley tweeted, “Does someone have to die?” and Broadway gossip columnist Michael Riedel was just warming up in the bullpen.

But long before the accidents began and actors found themselves in perpetual defensive postures, there had been disquieting headlines, the kind that exhilarate the acerbic snarky naysayer but also the kind that can mobilize the black clouds of doom from which a show is hard-pressed to escape. And in the ethos of a troubled show where the passing of a week can feel like eternity, the suffering is incontestable.

The New York Post and Variety scooped it first. There were “cash flow obstacles,” which somehow felt euphemistically like a softer gut-punch than “the show is 20 million dollars short.” But it was, which seemed implausible because the “sleep-well-children” lullaby sung by the producers had been brass-band emphatic: “The one thing we don’t have to worry about is money … the one thing we don’t have to worry about is money … the one thing …”

The workshop of the show two years earlier in a New York rehearsal room played like a sweetheart of a piece and everyone wanted a slice of the investment. Why wouldn’t they? The pedigree alone was an embarrassment of riches: Julie Taymor, the visionary; Bono and The Edge, the Grammy-winning international superstars; Glen Berger, Emmy Award–winning, clever, and crafty writer. Heavy hitters all and sharp as thumbtacks. Stars and Angel investors fell in line for a piece of it. There were a few notes about things to fix, of course, like the top of the second act needed attention and Marvel Comics, the owner of the brand, had a few quibbles. But, by and large, there was the sense that the show was ace-in-the-hole solid.

Some 12 years prior in The Lion King Taymor had wondrously transformed a Broadway stage into African grasslands populated by human representations of indigenous animals. The effect was spellbinding, evocative, and groundbreaking. No one doubted and certainly no one questioned Taymor’s wherewithal. But there was a catch, and there could be no misinterpretation or misrepresentation: You, they, all of us playing the game of bringing Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark to the stage, every collective soul, must buy into the vision religiously and without hesitation. And then there was the maxim that hung over production rooms and offices like a commandment: “nobody wants to see a 10-million-dollar Spider-Man.”

David Garfinkle had been flying solo as money-raiser-in-chief for some time. Tony Adams and Garfinkle together had been co-pilots in the beginning, but the damnedest thing happened way back in 2005: Adams fell unconscious at the precise moment that The Edge was to put pen to paper and sign the contract. Adams was dead two days later of a brain hemorrhage. Garfinkle and Adams had become acquainted in 2001. Adams had had scant experience as a Broadway producer, and some bad breaks at that, but had successfully shepherded Blake Edwards’s Victor/Victoria to Broadway. Garfinkle was an entertainment lawyer and, through a series of someone-knows-someone-from-way-way-back circumstances, Adams and Garfinkle were granted producing rights by Marvel Comics to produce Spider-Man the musical.

And then, like a chain of inevitable, preordained events by the gods of creative greatness, a team emerged. Adams knew Paul McGuinness from the 1970s. McGuinness had been the road manager for an Irish rock band called U2. U2 band members Bono and The Edge lived down the road from Irish scriptwriter Neil Jordan. Neil Jordan’s films had been scored by composer Elliot Goldenthal, and Goldenthal was the domestic partner of Broadway and film director Julie Taymor.

And had this cozy collective been tethered together by common vision and comprehension of the limitations of the theatre genre then attached perhaps they might have stayed. But Jordan was a writer for film, not theatre, a fact painfully evident as Taymor relieved him of his duties, which caused no small amount of discord. Glen Berger, primarily a script writer for television and straight plays, impressed Taymor with his imaginative “audition” scene written in one night and with nothing to lose. Berger got the gig and team Spider-Man the musical was born, never to be torn asunder. Until a few years, lawsuits, fractured friendships, and multimillions of dollars later.

Once the workshop wrapped, it was time to grapple with the physical production which was going to be unlike any theatre of yesteryear replacing nuts and bolts with algorithms and 3D optics. It was all great in theory but also new and much untried. It was also going to cost a king’s ransom, but there again nobody wanted to see a 10-million-dollar Spider-Man. Or a bunch of ho-hum stage effects that had been done before. This had to be vanguard or not at all.

A flying workshop plotting flying combat and radical flying effects commenced on a Hollywood soundstage. In the 1950s, Peter Foy had devised a weight/counterweight system to “fly” Peter Pan around the Broadway stage. The contraption was relatively simple, and flying in the theatre remained relatively the same for over 50 years: A harness was placed on the “flying” actor with a thin but mighty cable attached to the back of the harness. Offstage and unseen by the audience, stagehands grunted and growled and sometimes jumped off ladders for necessary leverage, but through what was essentially a sophisticated pulley system theatre flying happened.

The theatre flight for Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark would resemble its predecessor not at all; in the theatre of Julie Taymor, the aerial design would more likely resemble flying on film but for the theatre. There was a problem though; whereas film in a theatrical context manipulates a sequence shot in segments to coalesce, in the theatre it must be a full integration from start to finish. And that had never been done before. Plus it had to be cool as hell.

Scott Rogers had designed the flying sequences for the films Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. For Broadway, he adopted technology from professional football game television: A camera suspended by multiple cables that allowed the camera operators to move the camera around the field via remote control. Attached to those cables would not be a camera but a human flying at speeds of over 40 miles per hour. Moreover, whereas Flying by Foy was operated by the pure brute of manpower pulling ropes, flying by Rogers involved complex computer programming that sent directions to equally complex―and incredibly expensive―hardware. If it worked, it would represent a significant leap forward in theatre stagecraft innovation. But would the technology work for the theatre? Nobody knew.

More daunting, what kind of theatre could house what was evolving as a behemoth in every department? Was this a “venue” show more suited for Madison Square Garden? A traditional Broadway house show? Was this piece more akin to Cirque du Soleil than a musical? When pressed to assign the proper “name” for something that had never been done before, the team eventually settled into monikering the show a “circus rock and roll drama.”

When production reps, designers, and producers began sniffing around what was then called the Hilton Theatre, that leviathan of all Broadway theatres, the jig was up. Young Frankenstein had taken up residence there just over a year earlier, but unlike that other Mel Brooks musical called The Producers it had trouble finding a consistent audience and was faltering. When Young Frankenstein closed on January 4, 2009, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had a home, letting down Julie Taymor who never wanted the show in a traditional Broadway house, so it was reported.

Regardless, a Broadway musical it was even if it didn’t play by the so-called rules and was reinventing them as it went along. And with reinvention comes necessary trial and error. Which costs money. But what the heck? “If there’s one thing we don’t have to worry about it’s money.”

Until they were 20 million dollars short.

Rumors have spread among legiters that the production team for incoming mega-musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark may be threatened. The extensive work being done to prep for the technically demanding show, both in the shop constructing the physical production and in the theatre where Spider-Man is due to bow, is said to have stopped.

Variety, August 6, 2009

It went on: “The halt is attributed to cash flow obstacles.”

The burn of the U.S. financial crisis in the fall of 2008 had melted the financial markets and taken fortunes with them. Millions pledged by backers that Garfinkle had finagled to capitalize Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had evaporated, and the moneymen and moneywomen themselves were routinely letting his incoming calls go straight to voice mail. But by now millions were out in contracts and bills were raining in. Production costs and the leasing and readying of the Hilton Theatre weren’t all of it; millions more must be held in a bank account to restore the theatre back to its original form whether the show ran 20 years, a day, or not at all.

With best efforts, all efforts really, failing, a demoralized Garfinkle had no choice but to halt production immediately and indefinitely. With renovations stopped, sets unpainted, and costumes unstitched, the actors too were officially released from their contracts. Except for one: Alan Cumming, who had signed to play the Green Goblin, was placed on retainer for when the money showed up, which the production team was certain it would. Until it didn’t.

Deep-pocketed rock tour promoter Michael Cohl had a lengthy list of millionaires programmed into his speed dial. Bono and The Edge, being Bono and The Edge, made a few calls. Cohl was tapped to ferry this thing, whatever it was, back out to sea.

By March the show, in spite of having suffered setbacks and pushbacks on dates because of set building issues, technology snafus, casting complications, and, finally, “cash flow obstacles,” wobbled back onto the track. The budget had now reportedly ballooned to over 50 million dollars.

The hell of it all was the fact that the show was still a 30-million-dollar musical. Washington Post theatre critic Peter Marks was compelled to wonder “where all those tens of millions went” because an astronomical swath of it didn’t end up on stage. Rather, it was, according to reports, shelled out in astronomical rent payments to retain the Hilton Theatre, legal fees, retainers, a casting process that was now down the drain, and anything and everything else imaginable.

Shortly before the resumption of work, Cohl cleared the coal-sized lump from his throat and revealed that this elephantine show would require at least 40 stagehands (and counting) to run the backstage tasks and that cost would jack the weekly operating costs to a staggering 1.1 million dollars per week (and counting).

Rehearsals with the full cast (mercifully, many of the originals returned) began in August of 2010. They were to continue for four weeks before technical rehearsals began. Barring no unforeseen circumstances, the show would play its first preview to a live audience on November 6, 2010.

There were unforeseen circumstances.

In a typical rehearsal period for a show, the great majority of what occurs involving the actors on stage is worked out in the rehearsal room, leaving the technical elements to be sorted once the cast arrives at the theatre. Nothing being typical in this Spider-Man though, 13 of the then 37 scenes contained in the show could not be rehearsed until the cast arrived onto the set and into the complicated flying harnesses and navigated a labyrinthine of complex costumes, miles of scenery, and a phalanx of stagehands. The show was sitting on a live wire and Taymor knew it but dismissed it as “the nature of the beast.” The technical rehearsal period would, out of necessity, have to double as a de facto rehearsal period for more than one-third of the show.

By three weeks into the cast rehearsals, nearly all of the technical hardware had been loaded into the Hilton Theatre and was being methodically readied for population by the actors. This included the ring truss.

The ring truss. The sound of the name of the thing alone induced a twitch in Michael Cohl’s lower posterior. It was a colossal contraption that, at the climax of the show, would deploy a massive funnel-shaped spider web over the heads of the audience in which Spider-Man and Arachne would battle to the death. If it worked, it would be a coup de theatre like no one had ever witnessed. If it didn’t, it would be a massively expensive screwup like no one had ever witnessed. So, would it work? No one knew. During production meetings, it was posited that a model be built for test purposes. The model would cost around 80,000 dollars and still might not provide conclusive proof one way or another. That plan was scrapped. The other option was to build a scale model of half of it, which also might not prove conclusive. Also scrapped. Finally, the decision was to go all in. In total, the piece would cost one million dollars. It would also be at the center of what would be a great undoing. But that was still months out.

Within a week the ring truss came down, it being apparent that the whole undertaking was a massive misfire. A million-dollar misfire. But the million bucks weren’t all that had hurriedly gone up in flames; with the ring truss having been consigned to the trash heap, now there was no finale either.

The first accident happened during technical rehearsals on September 26. It was only a broken toe, but in the theatre “only” can be no casual dismissal; an injury even as uncomplicated as a broken toe is in that context wildly complex and several layers deep. If the actor cannot walk then he or she is likely out of the show for a period of time. This affects not only the livelihood of the actor but the well-being of the show itself, often requiring replacement actors being found and p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
• 2 Lestat
• 3 Urban Cowboy
• 4 The Pirate Queen
• 5 Rocky
• 6 King Kong
• 7 Escape to Margaritaville
• 8 Glory Days
• 9 Bullets Over Broadway
• 10 Dance of the Vampires