TOP of the FLOPS
It’s 1926 and the actress and singer Belle Baker is panting for a Broadway hit. The chances are that she might have it delivered at the New Amsterdam Theatre in a Flo Ziegfeld show called Betsy. The songs are by Rodgers and Hart, whose joint creations already include classics such as Manhattan, Blue Room and Mountain Greenery. But none of what they produce for Betsy will do for Belle. The day before they open she turns to an old friend, Irving Berlin. He delivers a song which they take to Ziegfeld, who agrees to have it stealthily inserted into the score.
The curtain rises, and by the end of the first act it’s clear that the show is failing to electrify the audience. During the second act Rodgers and Hart suddenly give a start. They don’t recognise the introduction to the third song. Nor should they. Berlin’s cuckoo has burst into their nest and it is a show-stopper, called Blue Skies. The audience erupts and Belle takes no fewer than 27 encores. She has her Broadway hit, but only with this song.
Betsy struggles to survive the critical drubbing it receives and runs for only 39 performances. The show is a flop, but Blue Skies goes on forever. Thus did a turkey bring forth a pearl.
The history of the stage musical glistens with pearls strewn among the flotsam of flops. Here’s Carnival In Flanders, lying on this desolate sand since 1953. Bankrolled by Bing Crosby, written and directed by Preston Sturges, a big name from Hollywood, with songs by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, and starring Dolores Gray, it should have been an incredible success. But the original writers pulled out, to be replaced by the brilliant Dorothy Fields, only to have her work discarded by Sturges, who also ditched the original director and the choreographer.
When the show opened, The New York Times condemned it as ‘laborious and banal’. It closed after six performances. And the pearl left lying in the ruins? Here’s That Rainy Day, a masterpiece by Burke and Van Heusen, reckoned by some to be the finest popular song ever written.
But there are so many ‘finest popular songs ever written’ in the American songbook. Take Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s All The Things You Are. It survived a 1939 Broadway show called Very Warm For May.
‘Not so hot for November,’ declared The New York Times, in spite of its being directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring June Allyson, Eve Arden and Vera-Ellen. After 59 performances the show was gone, but the song lived on, and still does.
Flops, or ‘the shows that got away’, are saluted in a new revue by Adrian Wright, which is touring this autumn. He reckons he might have coined a word that should make it into the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘flopsical’, which he’s chosen as the title of this affectionate, jolly entertainment. ‘We’re not here to jeer, we’re here to cheer,’ goes the opening song.
‘We’re trying to bring back a realisation of what wonders are there, both in songs that are well known and songs that haven’t been heard for years and years, from Broadway and the West End,’ Adrian says.
He’s already paid homage to the British post-war musical, both homegrown and imported, with flops included, in an excellent book, A Tanner’s Worth Of Tune. His credentials are strengthened by running his own company that releases resurrected cast recordings of dimly remembered gems of British theatre. In fact, the name says it all: Must Close Saturday Records.
As for what wonders are there, try this: ‘The book is witless, the songs are tuneless and the dancing is derivative. Apart from one original and witty production number in an airport lounge, the whole show is a disaster…’ This was The Spectator’s theatre critic savaging a real five-star clunker called Mister Venus.
The story behind this calamity of 1958 would make a show in its own right. The plot involved a humble postman who receives a visit from an extraterrestrial being who urges him to change the world. Alan Melville, who wrote it, was so dismayed by a rehearsal in Manchester that he ordered his name to be removed from the credits. Johnny Speight, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were brought in to try and rescue the script.
The postman was Frankie Howerd, the visitor from space was Anton Diffring, who flew in on wires wearing little else but a gold lamé posing pouch and a blonde wig. The female lead was the lovely Judith Bruce.
‘The director, Charles Reading, wanted his wife Sheila Matthews to play the juvenile lead,’ says Judith, ‘but Bernard Delfont and Frankie wanted me, so eventually I was given the part. Because Reading didn’t particularly like me or want me there, he was very critical of all the scenes that Frankie and I had together.
‘One morning, Frankie had had enough. He really had a hissy fit; he jumped up and down like a little child and stamped his feet, and bolted off stage, exit left. I was struck dumb.’ The word is that there were fisticuffs in a hotel corridor involving Howerd and the young composer, Trevor Stanford, later to be famous for his rather trite piano-playing as Russ Conway.
They eventually opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre. ‘It was a disaaaaster,’ says Adrian. ‘It had terrible, terrible reviews.’ Judith could hardly forget the reaction of the first-night audience. ‘We lined up for our final curtain call and they hurled vegetables on to the stage, at Frankie. Instead of being festooned with beautiful flowers, we were having to dodge potatoes and cauliflowers.’
Sixteen performances later, it closed. ‘The whole thing was absolutely ghastly for poor Frankie,’ says Judith, ‘but it set me on the road, and I started getting lots of parts after that. So something good came out of it for me.’
Audiences loved Judith in productions of Oliver!, The Pajama Game, Irma La Douce and many more. Poor Frankie had a breakdown and his career went into the doldrums until the satire boom of the 1960s rescued him.
No classic song was to emerge from Mister Venus, but the show did yield a tiny seed pearl of a number called, ironically, Time To Celebrate.
‘I must say I tend to find a lot of flop musicals more interesting than musicals that are happening now,’ says Adrian, who saw Les Misérables and remained unmoved and uncomprehending, while people around were crying, howling and jeering. ‘So much of what musicals are now is the result of hype and huge advertising.’
Hype and huge advertising would be unlikely to make much of the eccentric romanticism of clever lyrics such as these, taken from April In Cricklewood by Alan Melville and Charles Zwar:
April in Cricklewood
where love first came;
No slap and tickle
could seem quite the same;
April in Cricklewood,
rain, sleet and sex,
Each little trickle
would run down your specs.
April in Cricklewood, I see it still;
You caught my fickle mood,
I caught your chill.
It’s a song that is one of the old crowd, the sort of charmer that’s breezed into Flopsical!, words and music milling cheerfully about the stage, rejuvenated and having a wonderful time.
For Flopsical! tour dates and venues: www.mustclosesaturday.co.uk
The curtain rises, and by the end of the first act it’s clear that the show is failing to electrify the audience. During the second act Rodgers and Hart suddenly give a start. They don’t recognise the introduction to the third song. Nor should they. Berlin’s cuckoo has burst into their nest and it is a show-stopper, called Blue Skies. The audience erupts and Belle takes no fewer than 27 encores. She has her Broadway hit, but only with this song.
Betsy struggles to survive the critical drubbing it receives and runs for only 39 performances. The show is a flop, but Blue Skies goes on forever. Thus did a turkey bring forth a pearl.
The history of the stage musical glistens with pearls strewn among the flotsam of flops. Here’s Carnival In Flanders, lying on this desolate sand since 1953. Bankrolled by Bing Crosby, written and directed by Preston Sturges, a big name from Hollywood, with songs by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, and starring Dolores Gray, it should have been an incredible success. But the original writers pulled out, to be replaced by the brilliant Dorothy Fields, only to have her work discarded by Sturges, who also ditched the original director and the choreographer.
When the show opened, The New York Times condemned it as ‘laborious and banal’. It closed after six performances. And the pearl left lying in the ruins? Here’s That Rainy Day, a masterpiece by Burke and Van Heusen, reckoned by some to be the finest popular song ever written.
But there are so many ‘finest popular songs ever written’ in the American songbook. Take Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s All The Things You Are. It survived a 1939 Broadway show called Very Warm For May.
‘Not so hot for November,’ declared The New York Times, in spite of its being directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring June Allyson, Eve Arden and Vera-Ellen. After 59 performances the show was gone, but the song lived on, and still does.
Flops, or ‘the shows that got away’, are saluted in a new revue by Adrian Wright, which is touring this autumn. He reckons he might have coined a word that should make it into the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘flopsical’, which he’s chosen as the title of this affectionate, jolly entertainment. ‘We’re not here to jeer, we’re here to cheer,’ goes the opening song.
‘We’re trying to bring back a realisation of what wonders are there, both in songs that are well known and songs that haven’t been heard for years and years, from Broadway and the West End,’ Adrian says.
He’s already paid homage to the British post-war musical, both homegrown and imported, with flops included, in an excellent book, A Tanner’s Worth Of Tune. His credentials are strengthened by running his own company that releases resurrected cast recordings of dimly remembered gems of British theatre. In fact, the name says it all: Must Close Saturday Records.
As for what wonders are there, try this: ‘The book is witless, the songs are tuneless and the dancing is derivative. Apart from one original and witty production number in an airport lounge, the whole show is a disaster…’ This was The Spectator’s theatre critic savaging a real five-star clunker called Mister Venus.
The story behind this calamity of 1958 would make a show in its own right. The plot involved a humble postman who receives a visit from an extraterrestrial being who urges him to change the world. Alan Melville, who wrote it, was so dismayed by a rehearsal in Manchester that he ordered his name to be removed from the credits. Johnny Speight, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were brought in to try and rescue the script.
The postman was Frankie Howerd, the visitor from space was Anton Diffring, who flew in on wires wearing little else but a gold lamé posing pouch and a blonde wig. The female lead was the lovely Judith Bruce.
‘The director, Charles Reading, wanted his wife Sheila Matthews to play the juvenile lead,’ says Judith, ‘but Bernard Delfont and Frankie wanted me, so eventually I was given the part. Because Reading didn’t particularly like me or want me there, he was very critical of all the scenes that Frankie and I had together.
‘One morning, Frankie had had enough. He really had a hissy fit; he jumped up and down like a little child and stamped his feet, and bolted off stage, exit left. I was struck dumb.’ The word is that there were fisticuffs in a hotel corridor involving Howerd and the young composer, Trevor Stanford, later to be famous for his rather trite piano-playing as Russ Conway.
They eventually opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre. ‘It was a disaaaaster,’ says Adrian. ‘It had terrible, terrible reviews.’ Judith could hardly forget the reaction of the first-night audience. ‘We lined up for our final curtain call and they hurled vegetables on to the stage, at Frankie. Instead of being festooned with beautiful flowers, we were having to dodge potatoes and cauliflowers.’
Sixteen performances later, it closed. ‘The whole thing was absolutely ghastly for poor Frankie,’ says Judith, ‘but it set me on the road, and I started getting lots of parts after that. So something good came out of it for me.’
Audiences loved Judith in productions of Oliver!, The Pajama Game, Irma La Douce and many more. Poor Frankie had a breakdown and his career went into the doldrums until the satire boom of the 1960s rescued him.
No classic song was to emerge from Mister Venus, but the show did yield a tiny seed pearl of a number called, ironically, Time To Celebrate.
‘I must say I tend to find a lot of flop musicals more interesting than musicals that are happening now,’ says Adrian, who saw Les Misérables and remained unmoved and uncomprehending, while people around were crying, howling and jeering. ‘So much of what musicals are now is the result of hype and huge advertising.’
Hype and huge advertising would be unlikely to make much of the eccentric romanticism of clever lyrics such as these, taken from April In Cricklewood by Alan Melville and Charles Zwar:
April in Cricklewood
where love first came;
No slap and tickle
could seem quite the same;
April in Cricklewood,
rain, sleet and sex,
Each little trickle
would run down your specs.
April in Cricklewood, I see it still;
You caught my fickle mood,
I caught your chill.
It’s a song that is one of the old crowd, the sort of charmer that’s breezed into Flopsical!, words and music milling cheerfully about the stage, rejuvenated and having a wonderful time.
For Flopsical! tour dates and venues: www.mustclosesaturday.co.uk