Unlikely hit musicals?

[vampire musical]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 8:44pm

What are some musicals (or plays) that on paper seem like tough sells that go on to be huge hits?  For example, if 10 years ago, someone said "Let's make a musical about Founding Father Alexander Hamilton -- and we'll make him rap!  It'll be huge!" you'd have thought they were crazy.

[Cupid Boy2]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 8:47pm

Xanadu immediately comes to mind for me if only because of their tagline "Broadway's surprise hit musical." I definitely wouldn't call it a huge hit, though, and I don't believe it actually recouped if we want to use a strict definition of what a hit is. Regardless, I think it still did better than what many were expecting.

Updated On: 3/24/16 at 08:47 PM

[Jeffrey Karasarides]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 8:47pm

1776
Avenue Q
Cats
Fun Home
A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder
Les Miserables
Next to Normal
Once
Spring Awakening

Updated On: 3/24/16 at 08:47 PM

[funhamilton_rent]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 8:54pm

Wicked. I know that everyone is going to disagree but last summer, I had an interview with David Stone and he said that he did not expect it to do as well as it did/is.

[wonderfulwizard11]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 8:59pm

Urinetown: a show with a godawful title that opens just after 9/11 and is about a dystopian future where people need to pay to pee and and are brutally executed when they fail to obey. Not to mention, it stars absolutely no names (with the possible exception of John Cullum) and has a score that sounds more like Weill than any kind of modern musical. And yet, it wins three Tony Awards and runs for over two years, despite that it sounds like an absolute disaster on paper. 

[dramamama611]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 9:10pm

Les Miz.  Who the heck could imagine that Victor Hugo's LONG, rambling novel that is page after page of pain, drudgery and misery could, first,  be ON stage? Second, make it a musical?? And third, make it an uplifting musical???

[funhamilton_rent]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 9:43pm

Spring Awakening 

Rent

In The Heights

ONCE

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 10:30pm

In early descriptions, SWEENEY TODD sounded as if Sondheim and Prince had lost their minds.

I even had a dream a couple of nights before the first preview: in my dream, Len Carious performed his entire role in Middle English (a la Chaucer) and Angela spoke nothing but French... That's how odd I imagined the entire project would be.

Then I saw the first preview...

But, really, SWEENEY was no more unlikely than a musical based on 14 one-act plays about marriage, or a musical about Follies' ghosts, or a show written entirely in waltz tempos and variations on waltzes. I just didn't know about those shows until they opened.

Updated On: 3/24/16 at 10:30 PM

[ZellMorrowsPledge]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 10:34pm

Fun Home!!!

Wicked

In The Heights

Rent

Spring Awakening

 

[vampire musical]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 10:46pm

Funny story about Wicked:  an agent once told me that a lot of the Wicked designers negotiated better front end deals versus back end because they all thought the show would bomb.  It probably cost them a few hundred thousand out of the millions they have made. 13 years this October!

[Mr. Nowack]

Posted: 3/24/16 at 11:41pm

CHICAGO revival. It was received lukewarmly in its OBC iteration now its in its tenth year.

[AEA AGMA SM]

Posted: 3/25/16 at 12:07am

Chicago is well beyond its tenth year and will be celebrating its 20th anniversary this November.

[Mr. Nowack]

Posted: 3/25/16 at 12:42am

Oops! Totally what I meant.

[NOWaWarning]

Posted: 3/25/16 at 2:16am

The great Jackie Hoffman told a very funny story in one of her acts once. She was in Hairspray, which was a colossal hit, and her and the rest of the cast were feeling great. Then they heard about a show that was supposed to come in the next season. According to her, their reaction was a dismissive "Ha! Witches. Whatever." Of course the show she was referring to was Wicked.

[Patash]

Posted: 3/25/16 at 11:24am

I still think it's hard to top a 3 hour musical about the most miserable people in the world (in fact it's even titled that way) that focuses on a man who steals a loaf of bread and spends the rest of his life paying for it.

 

 

 

[hork]

Posted: 3/25/16 at 11:29am

dramamama611 said: "Les Miz.  Who the heck could imagine that Victor Hugo's LONG, rambling novel that is page after page of pain, drudgery and misery could, first,  be ON stage? Second, make it a musical?? And third, make it an uplifting musical???

 

Les Miserables, uplifting? Every time I see it I'm depressed for days.

 

[Patash]

Posted: 3/25/16 at 12:14pm

Hey, hork, I think they mean it "uplifts your lunch" when you see it.

 

 

[Wilmingtom]

Posted: 3/25/16 at 4:12pm

How about a rock/pop musical imagining the final days of Christ's life?

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 3/25/16 at 7:01pm

Cats
The Threepenny Opera
 

[Ranger Tom]

Posted: 3/25/16 at 10:57pm

Assassins comes to mind.  Sweeney, of course.  I really think Oklahoma is a strange bit of a musical (but I love it).  A dry, unattractive state, creepy villain using pornography, loose young woman tangling with a peddler.  Remember the love it/hate it with West Side Story - people losing their minds over gang members leaping around New York?  

[Randomlink1]

Posted: 3/26/16 at 9:56am

I wouldn't exactly call Assassins a hit, but it certainly did a lot better than most would expect. With Urinetown, I think it was about timing that nobody thought it would be s hit. In today's world of meta-musicals, I think that people would expect it to sell out every night. But it was very new for its time, so that's why it was so surprising.

I want to make a case for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. First of all, it was based upon an unfinished Charles Dickens novel  nobody remembers, and its main attraction was that you get to vote for the ending. Additionally , the plot is impossible to follow, the script is very unfunny and mediocre at best, and the voting is only a small part of the play. And yet the original production won a huge amount ofTonys, and ran for 600 performances.

 

  

[Broadway Forever2]

Posted: 3/26/16 at 10:24am

I mean what do you qualify as a likely hit musical. People are naming most hit musicals here. I disagree with Wicked tbh though.  Wizard of Oz is very popular and the 2 females leads and message make me think it would definitely be a hit but I guess a lot of big budget musicals fail so that's why they were worried.  I think it can be difficult to determine what will strike a chord with audiences though.  I mean there are tons of ways a hip hop musical about a relatively unknown founding fatger could have bombed or a 3 hour musical based of that depressing french victor Hugo book could have been a mess so quality, writing , music and message plays a huge factor. 

[QueenAlice]

Posted: 3/26/16 at 10:30am

Most of the great hit musicals of all time look like terrible ideas on paper. 

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 3/26/16 at 10:35am

Conversely, most of those that looked good on paper turned out to be real dogs .

[Jeffrey Karasarides]

Posted: 3/26/16 at 10:49am

Another unlikely hit I can think of is Kinky Boots. A musical adaptation of a British independent film that was never a big commodity that was coming into a season where Matilda was expected to be the big frontrunner. Not to mention that it had a star composer (Cyndi Lauper) doing the score, and musicals written by star composers rarely ever succeed (9 to 5, The Capeman, Lestat, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Taboo, Tarzan, Thou Shalt Not, etc.).

Yet Kinky Boots came to Broadway, became a surprise hit, and won six Tony Awards (including Best Musical).