Anatomy Of A Broadway Flop: What Sank These Four Shows?

Interesting article. I saw all the musicals in the article with the exception of Disaster. Personally I think Broadway prices, especially during previews, are too $$$. Imagine a family of 5 spending at least $60 each for a balcony or rear mezz seat --- that's $300 already! If people are going to spend their hard earned dollars, they want to make sure they'll be entertained and won't fall asleep.

I'm surprised the article didn't mention anything about marketing in social media. Most of my friends never heard of Bright Star until the Tony nominations (my friends and I don't work in theater industry so we're no experts.) Even on YouTube, I don't really see that many interviews or clips from the show. Hamilton, on the other hand, has hundreds ranging from Ham4Ham to cast interviews to behind the scenes stuff, etc.

I wish the article also analyzed Allegiance, which was a musical that opened this past fall yet was a flop.

Guess the producers of AP wished they went the off Broadway road now,.

No great insights in this article.

Wick3's post raised more interesting points.

After Eight said: "No great insights in this article.

Wick3's post raised more interesting points.



Not even any small insights were raised by this article. It read like it was written by someone who hadn't even seen any of these shows.



As others have mentioned, there was no discussion of marketing, or lack thereof. Why do these producers/marketing teams think they only need to start advertising halfway through the preview period? Josh Groban was on Live With Kelly this week promoting Natasha, Pierre and the Hello, Dolly revival already feels like the event of the season and it's 9 months away! I remember a Billy Elliot billboard up in Times Square something like 8-9 months before the first preview began. If you don't have a decent advance you might as well not even bother opening because unless you have genius producer at the helm you're sunk.



What about Bright Star's generic title and artwork that didn't help explain what the show was about?



What about the desperation announced by Tuck when they put a seemingly endless number of $20 tickets on sale for the entire preview period? (Psycho did something similar, but only for six early previews, and never on the weekend performances. Although I appreciate and take advantage of these ticket deals they shout to the world that the show isn't selling and there is no reason to purchase a full price ticket to the show- Scottsboro Boys, Bloody, Bloody, Dames at Sea and It Shoulda Been You all offered the same deal and all went down the same road to flopdom.)



The article mentions mixed critical reaction to many of the shows, but the author seems to be working under the assumption that all four of these shows were intrinsically good shows and some outside forces worked against them to fail. What if they just sucked?

This is a nothing article to me. It adds no insight and doesn't fully examine why any of these shows didn't last. Wasn't worth the reading time I put into it.

My question has always been about endgame. Are any of these flops redeemable/recoupable with recording, tour or licensing? "Tuck Everlasting" always seemed to me like a show that was almost set up to flop, just so it could get the Broadway credit and cast recording that will make it more marketable as a regional and community licensing regular.

I'm a little more curious about "Disaster," which seems like a show built around the group of colleagues who put it on, and "American Psycho," which might be popular with regionals but might be scrapped as a "too complex to license" piece.

^^^ The article does mention those shows as a possibly contributing factor.



For musicals that opened this spring, it was an especially unforgiving season. Broadway is increasingly saturated with long-running hits, and four musicals that opened last fall — “School of Rock,” “On Your Feet!,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “The Color Purple” — reached the new year still running strong.

“People don’t have to go to their ‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll like it’ show when there are so many ‘You’re going to love it’ shows to see,” said Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five of the 40 Broadway houses.

Updated On: 6/23/16 at 11:11 AM

One small comfort to me is that none of these flops were particularly well written aside from Bright Star's score. When a poorly written show flops, it's no serious affront to art. In my opinion, it's much harder to stomach when superb show like The Visit flops because it cannot find an audience.

I think American Psycho just had the wrong word-of-mouth going for it. They marketed it as this sexy musical, and honestly, it wasn't. What it was was a crazy, inventive new musical. And that somehow got swallowed up by the weird reviews - Brantley's read like soft core porn.

Bright Star might have just been a little too small and a little too earnest for Broadway these days. They want glitz and glamour and production value, etc. But I think of all the musicals it will live on regionally.

agreed about the rave reviews from its run at the Public.

the Ham4Ham shows was something new and quite effective. Not sure if the members of the cast or if their guests get paid for it but still it is ingenius!



i think Bright Star definitely has potential. Heck my friend and I even asked ourselves if we saw a bright star in the musical during the performance.

I never believed in the fiction that the the popularity of "that show" would turn into a boom for everyone else...but really, now with th shuttering of Shuffle Along, streets are running with red ink.



i think the marketing for a lot of these shows were terrible, and no matter how much they spent, they could never get out of the way of the loads of free publicity the media gage Hamilton. Between Vulture and Playbill, you could see over a dozen articles a day in free publicity. I always called Hamilton the Donald Trump of Broadway, seeing the millions of free dollars of publicity it got. Who could compete?

The topic of marketing keeps coming up here.

It'd be interesting to pull up the info to see who the agencies/execs are on these four shows + other recent flops and see if there's any common thread there.

Also, Hamilton doesn't do [all of] their marketing through an agency - they have independent social media, which frees them up to do whatever they want, whenever, because they have a social team on staff to do it.