flop musicals? — Page 2

Favorite Flops

1. Baker St
2. Superman
3. Inner City
4. Jimmy
5. Rockabye Hamlet
6. Follies
7. Look To The Lillies
8. Bajour
9. Amour
10.Hallelujah, Baby

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WAITING FOR THE MOON has only had a try-out production in Marlton, New Jersey during the Summer of 2005 for about 1 month. I saw the show a couple times and both times the audience LOVED it. Even the critics liked this one. It's far from a flop and may become Frank's biggest show.

"Flop" and "hit" are terms that Variety coined decades ago regarding the financial status of shows. While the terms may have since come to have other meanings, they really should only refer to whether a show recouped its investment or not and nothing more.

Hal Prince -- director, producer and winner of 20 Tonys in a 50 year career -- has talked about being responsible for many flops and many hits and many "successes" and many "failures." The latter two terms are artistic ones, not financial ones. For him, there are many "flops" that have been great "successes" to him, that were exactly the shows he wanted to present and the fact that they weren't also commercial hits is acceptable to him.

For those whose main concern is creating good, challenging new work that perhaps pushes the artform forward, the primary concern is not always about box office success. Prince has talked about how no one who's ONLY concern was financial success would have even been involved in projects in like Pacific Overtures or Sweeney Todd -- which both were unsurprisingly flops in their initial Broadway runs. Now, more than ever, the American theatre relies on artists and producers and companies who are less concerned with whether the works they create are financially viable or not, than with surefire commercial hits. And ironically, many of the major hits of the future will probably come from the less obvious places than from the same old ideas derived from the predictable movie and other sources of the recent past.

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Ok speaking of flop musicals or in other terms musicals that did not do so well on Broadway ... The Scarlet Pimpernel... i liked it... maybe it falls into my category of regional theatre shows that i like more than broadway ... but the version i saw was amazing. Heck i dont know the history of it, it may not even have been on Broadway all i know is it's a musical and it's out there somewhere and I love it...
Anyone heard of it?? Anyone else think it's good??

another amazing one that opened on 9/11 which is why it immediately flopped is The Spitfire Grill ... that has some incredible songs.

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Thanks Margo for the Flop definition information. I was hoping you would post that in this thread.

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Even though it won several Tony Awards, Parade is still considered a flop as well...and it is one of my favorite shows of all time.

I also enjoy listening to the recordings of Wildhorn's flops The Scarlet Pimpernel and to a lesser extent The Civil War.

Historically speaking..a nice old time musical comedy flop that may be worth owning is Subways are for Sleeping. There are nice performances on there from Carol Lawrence and Phyllis Newman and it is a chance to hear a lesser known Jule Styne score. The CD also contains some demo recordings and cut songs that are performed by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Of course it is nice to have the show on disc just because of its cult status due to the whole David Merrick/newspaper ad episode.

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"You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering." --Harold Hill from The Music Man