Your Favorite "Lost" Musicals?

The thread about Secret Life of Bees got me wondering- what are some of your favorite musicals that are, for lack of a better term, "lost"- shows that debuted somewhere but never transferred to Broadway or had larger productions, shows that were never recorded, shows that almost never are produced and have been largely forgotten?

I'm very partial to the score of César Alvarez's Futurity, which was done at Ars Nova in 2015 but subsequently has never really been seen again despite winning several Lortels and garnering positive notices.

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Sing Street immediately came to mind. At least I still can listen to the cast recording. I really loved that show at NYTW.

ABC’s Gepetto the musical lol

Rebecca, truly

Before LOTR came back, the lushness of that original three act production

Am I wrong for missing Millie? I know it's just back in limbo, but I hope we'll see it again one day.

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“Rebecca, truly

Before LOTR came back, the lushness of that original three act production

Am I wrong for missing Millie? I know it's just back in limbo, but I hope we'll see it again one day.”



Lost? All of these have cast recordings and produced often.

Funny, I was going to say “The Dead”, too. It’s in my top 5 favorite musicals and whenever I mention it to almost anyone, they have no clue what I’m talking about. So I guess maybe it is a “lost” musical. I just can’t believe it hasn’t been done in almost 25 years now. Every christmas, I wish someone would decide to do a limited run. I said in another thread recently how I’d love for Colin Firth to play Gabriel so maybe if I keep saying it, it’ll happen.

And I also need Mary Beth Peil as Aunt Julia.

Updated On: 10/3/24 at 01:02 PM

Rags Parkland Sings Songs of the Future, at Ars Nova in 2018. There was a commercial run planned at some point but it was cancelled .

Oh wow, I forgot about The Dead! Such an interesting piece, and the desolate nature of the Belasco at the time fit it perfectly.


I throughly enjoyed The Secret Life of Bees and wished it had a greater life.

Smile: as far as I know, the Hamilsch/Ashman musical has never had a major AAA production of its "finished" version. I think even Encores presented the original Broadway version, not the rewritten one with the synthesizer-based reference recording.

Pokemon- Gotta Catch 'Em Live: the score is incredibly catchy but the book is BAAAAAAD. If this one had a spruced up book (what I wouldn't give for that job), it would do SpongeBob numbers in licensing.

A Fine and Private Place: a sweet little chamber musical about the space between life and death. Unfortunately it wound up in a legal battle with the state of novelist Peter S. Beagle, so I doubt we'll be seeing this one ever again.

Bohemia!: in the early days of internet file sharing and torrenting, I had an audio bootleg of this satirical revue from Florida. I don't know if it was an official Disney Cast Members theatre company or just something staged in their community, but the concept seemed to be "songs from 'adult' musicals, winkingly cleaned up and Disneyfied." It was downloaded from a torrent on Demonoid, then a fairly popular site. By the time I remembered this show and looked it up, I could find nothing about it, and the torrent itself was long gone. This would have been somewhere between 2000 and 2008, no later.

Updated On: 10/3/24 at 02:52 PM

Thank you for reminding me about A Fine and Quiet Place. I loved this and think I had a CD? Is that possible?

And at LCT3 there was In the Green. It has some beautiful music.

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In addition to the Smile answers above, even though neither of my following choices technically fits the prompt: I really enjoy both the novel and film Giant, so even though I've only ever heard one song from the score, it's a show I would be very interested in. And I would love a full-fledged Golden Apple revival, because that score!

I loved “The Blue Flower”! That’s a show I really wish a cast recording existed.

Not a lost “show” so much as a lost variant, but during that same file-sharing era I was given a audio bootleg of a Pippin revival that was labeled as East West but wasn’t. It featured an upbeat EDM and dance based orchestration. Maybe an Alex Lacamoire?

Anyway, it was very cool and I wish it had a proper cast recording.