Top 10: West End Flops
Published on Friday 27th August, 11.25am, Written by Jonathan Dudley
Ahhh, the West End flop. It brings us such smug pleasure; it’s schadenfreude at its very best.
We don’t feel sorry for the casts who performed in these West End turkeys, they got paid, after all. We don’t even feel pity for the creative teams who suffered public embarrassment when their creations were savaged by critics. They’re thick-skinned folk, we tell ourselves.
Let’s hope that they are, because today we’re reminding ourselves of ten of the floppiest West End flops ever.
Gone With The Wind, a truly horrendous musical.
10) Gone With The Wind — The Musical
You’d think from the moment Sir Trevor Nunn first sat down and wrote those words he’d have known, deep down, that it was a ghastly idea. Sadly, he never seemed to work it out. With the help of Margaret Martin, an appalling, bloated, and boring production about how tough it was to be a slave-owner made it to the New London Theatre in early 2008.
The show starred Darius Danesh and relatively unknown US actress Jill Paice. They both put in decent enough performances but the half-hearted sets, sub-par narration, forgettable music, and sheer length of the production killed it dead.
Gone With The Wind closed after just 79 performances. Several critics couldn’t even offer the public a full review simply because they couldn’t bear to return to the auditorium for the second half.
9) Imagine This
Let me set the scene. Shuki Levy, the man who wrote the theme tunes for Inspector Gadget, Power Rangers, Big Bad Beetleborgs, and She-Ra, decides to write a musical. He turns to his pals, David Goldsmith and Glenn Berenbeim, and says “hey chaps, let’s write a musical set in the Warsaw Ghetto and let’s tie it in with the story of the battle of Masada (a siege which ended with the mass suicide of over 900 Jewish people)”.
In a moment of madness both agree and Imagine This was born. Needless to say, it wasn’t very good at all. In fact, it was somewhat offensive.
The production gathered a handful of favourable reviews but The Guardian suggested that “On Broadway, a street where Jewish sensitivities are much more acute than they are here, I can’t imagine Imagine This lasting a week”. The public agreed.
8 ) Behind The Iron Mask
Out of all the flops mentioned so far, this one is the only one which could have, theoretically, been pretty good. 17th century France, a mystery, songs and a scary mask; it all sounds rather promising.
At the helm was Professor John Robinson, an aerospace engineer who set up his own production company when he was in his seventies. He made a demo of a few of the songs from Behind the Iron Mask and miraculously, considering how dreadful they were, managed to secure almost £500,000 from private investors.
Almost as soon as it opened (in dangerously unpredictable August), Behind The Iron Mask was mauled by critics and after a few weeks of being bombarded by savage reviews, the show closed 78 days early.
7) Too Close To The Sun
You’ve got to admire the tenacity of John Robinson, even after the humiliating failure of Behind The Iron Mask, he returned to the West End in 2009 with what may well have been the worst piece of musical theatre ever made.
Too Close To The Sun was a fictionalisation of the last days of Ernest Hemingway featuring ghastly music, a clumsy plot, and far too many references to Mr Hemingway’s gun (not a euphemism). Even the most dedicated fans of Theatreland cheese could find nothing to love about this car crash of a musical and it closed six weeks early.
The highlight of the entire production was Helen Dallimore accidentally falling through a table. The table became a temporary star and was subsequently bought for unknown purposes by a Twitter pal of ours, @BatBoySings. It says a great deal when flimsy wicker furniture is the highlight of a musical.
Did Too Close To The Sun give birth to the world's first celebrity table?
6) Wilde
Mike Read was once a Radio 1 DJ, he was the one who famously would not play Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relax on the breakfast show due to “obscene” lyrics. He also wrote and directed a musical about the life of Oscar Wilde which lasted for just one night. What a career!
Read had good intentions, to celebrate one of the greatest minds that the United Kingdom has ever produced on the 150th anniversary of his birth. However, the musical was trite, poorly written, and poorly staged.
It opened on 19 October 2004 at the Shaw Theatre and was pulled the very next day with a depressingly honest statement from a theatre spokesperson: “After the first night, bookings were low and reviews were poor.”
5) All Bob’s Women
All Bob’s Women described itself as a “new sexy musical comedy”. On the face of it, that sounds good; we like new, we like sexy, we like musicals, and we like comedy. Somehow, despite the promising ingredients, All Bob’s Women was a painfully unfunny mess of a musical which the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer described as “rancid bilge water”.
Originally written in Italian, it could be argued that the subtle nuances of the production were lost in translation. However, the panto-like naffness of the humour (more than a few jokes were directed towards the size of Bob’s manhood) combined with a clunky, unlikeable score suggest that All Bob’s Women should have never left the continent.
The cliché-ridden musical failure managed just nine performances in the West End before it collapsed under the weight of its own awfulness.
Disappointing
4) Murderous Instincts
As with many flops, Murderous Instincts is a brilliant example of what happens when people with too much money and not enough talent get bored and decide to have a crack at writing.
The “salsa-comedy-murder-mystery” opened at the Savoy Theatre in 2004 with Broadway producer Manny Fox at the helm. The show muddled through the story of a recently widowed wife of a booze tycoon and her many feuds with family members over her dead husband’s money. Add to the mix lots and lots of Latin music and the world salsa champion and you have a bright and shiny, but ultimately vacuous musical.
After an unsuccessful opening and more than a few negative reviews, Fox obviously decided to cut his losses and returned home to Puerto Rico, informing the cast and crew that the show would close via email. In the end, Murderous instincts only managed a week in the West End.
3) The Fields of Ambrosia
When we think of West End musicals we usually think of good, happy things. Even after reading through this shameful list. However, in 1996 The Fields of Ambrosia came to the Aldwych Theatre and tried something a bit different. It didn’t work.
Basically, The Fields of Ambrosia was about a travelling executioner who wanders around America in 1918 blasting people into Kingdom Come with ‘Old Faithful’ (his electric chair, seriously).
The executioner then falls in love with Gretchen, his first female victim/client and horrible shenanigans ensue. There was male-on-male prison rape, prisoners sneaking off to visit the “exhausted” local hookers and warders sexually assaulting literally anyone unfortunate enough to stand in front of them for any length of time.
Unsurprisingly, The Fields of Ambrosia only managed just 22 performances.
2) Bad Girls: The Musical
Bad Girls was a bit of an institution at my house when it was on ITV, so when in 2007 we saw posters for a musical version opening at the Garrick Theatre I managed to persuade my family (who are suspicious of musical theatre) to take me to see it.
The experience was so mind-numbingly bad it put everyone except me off the West End for good. I am literally the only one who ever went back to the Theatreland after that fateful evening.
The show never really decided if it was a gritty drama with songs (as we foolishly assumed) or a campy romp through the apparently hilarious world of a women’s prison. The resulting production was jumbled, with truly gritty storylines placed alongside Chicago-style fantasy song and dance numbers.
Despite a few surprisingly positive reviews, Bad Girls: The Musical barely managed two months before it posted closure notices.
1) Which Witch
An “operamusical” written by Norwegians and inspired by the 1486 witchfinder’s handbook, the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches), sounds pretty awesome to me, but by all accounts it was a horrific failure.
It opened at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1992 with the Telegraph almost immediately quipping “Flops don’t come much floppier”. The story of a young lady being tried as a witch and subsequently burned at the stake failed to win over London audiences, even when the King and Queen of Norway showed up to lend their support.
Despite a truly vicious panning by London’s most acid-tongued critics, Which Witch lasted ten whole weeks, which for this list isn’t too bad of a run.
