GIRL CRAZY 1930
Ethel Merman electrified the audience by holding a high C for sixteen bars! Incidentally, Merman never experienced a flop.
NYMPH ERRANT 1933
Enjoyed only 154 performances at London's Adelphi Theatre. It was not well received and nor was it produced on Broadway, however Cole Porter considered it to be his best score. The choreographer Agnes De Mille did her first work with this show.
GLAMOROUS NIGHT 1935
As Ivor Novello was no singer, the leading male role as in all his other musicals, had nothing to sing. Amazingly, Ivor Novello wrote the screenplay for the very first Tarzan movie!
ME AND MY GIRL 1937
The original nine-song version was so short that it played twice nightly and enjoyed 1646 performances. The show was 'bombed out' of two theatres during the war. A re-written new production opened in London in 1985, success was assured when a BBC radio unit was forced to cancel a visit elsewhere and decided to relay a live broadcast from the Victoria Palace. Listeners at home on hearing The Lambeth Walk flocked to the box office and the production ran for 4000 performances. Robert Lindsay's sensational performance was repeated on Broadway winning him the Tony in 1986 the show ran for 1420 performances.
ON THE TOWN 1944 (FANCY FREE)
Originally the 20 minute Ballet Fancy Free by Jerome Robbins, it took 19 years before it played London's Prince of Wales theatre with Eliott Gould in the cast, where it died after 53 performances.
SOUTH PACIFIC 1949
Sean Connery was in the chorus for the original London production. Ray Walston was the only member of both London and Broadway productions to feature in the movie.
SALAD DAYS 1954
Nearly a flop until Princess Margaret visited it at the Vaudeville then played 2283 performances making it the longest running British show in history until overtaken by Oliver. The title Salad Days is from Shakespeare and was suggested by the bar attendant at the Bristol Old Vic where the show first appeared.
WEST SIDE STORY 1957
The original London run exceeded Broadway's 732 by playing 1039 performances. At the first band call of the opening Broadway show, the orchestra walked out because it was so horrendously difficult. To create the right atmosphere, the director Jerome Robbins forbade contractually, the actors playing The Sharks and The Jets to mix socially offstage or in their private lives. It was well known in London that there was considerable hatred between them. The show is rightly considered the greatest stage musical of all time, amazingly only making a minimal profit. It was the first show to employ a fully fledged Lighting Designer. Now playing Broadway to 100% capacity audiences after sensational reviews.
THE MUSIC MAN 1957
76 Trombones and Goodnight My Someone are in fact identical, only the tempos are different. The Beatles recorded one show tune in their repertoire The Music Man's Til There Was You. The 2000 Broadway revival proved to be a 'smash' all over again.
BLITZ (Lionel Bart) 1962
After the first night Noel Coward commented 'Twice as long and twice as noisy as the real thing'.
NO STRINGS 1962
Highly underrated Richard Rodgers musical, title referring to the love affair depicted and the fact that the full and large orchestra had no string section. No collaborator this time for Rodgers and he went on to win the Tony for music and lyrics.
FUNNY GIRL 1964
ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT, THE SMELL OF THE CROWD 1964
British try-out failed in Nottingham, blame was put down to audiences not accepting Norman Wisdom in the lead, hence no London production. David Merrick took it to Broadway but insisted that co-author Anthony Newley take the lead. Played 232 performances, although one critic said 'Third-rate commerce masquerading as art'.
TWANG!! 1965
So bad was this epic, that when the line 'I don't know what's going on here' was uttered, some bright spark in the audience shouted 'Neither do we!'. As backers pulled out prior to London, against all advice including Noel Coward's, Lionel Bart sunk his own money into the project, adding to his financial downfall. At one point the re-writes were so many and so close to performances, the new scripts were pasted onto the scenery! To add insult to injury, the calls were booed and Arthur Thirkell reported in the Daily Mirror, 'A load of old rubbish was thrown out after the Northern fiasco (Manchester). It has been replaced with a lot of brand new rubbish. The only memorable song up to the interval was the National Anthem'. The Sun reported that Barbara Windsor does manage to thrust her voice a little further out than her chest, but no one has found any real use for her vitality'. At one point there were 15 in the audience. The show limped along for 43 performances.
During his downfall, Bart sold the music publishing rights of Oliver to Max Bygraves and Jock Jacobson for £1000. They eventually resold them for around $1m.
HAIR 1968
First production to celebrate the end of stage censorship. The London run only terminated as the roof of the Shaftesbury collapsed in July 1973. Re-opened at the Queen's June 1974. Now revived and playing Broadway to great acclaim.
OH CALCUTTA 1969
Long-running avant-garde theatrical revue, created by British drama critic Kenneth Tynan. The show, consisting of various sketches on sex-related topics featured nudity throughout. Opened off-Broadway and ran in New York for over 1,600 performances while London saw over 2,400. The title is in fact taken from a painting by Clovis Trouille, itself a pun on "O quel cul t'as!", French for "What an ass you have!". The 1976 Broadway revival at the Edison Theatre ran for thirteen years, briefly becoming the longest-running play in Broadway history, with a total of 5,959 performances.
FOLLIES 1971
Hitting 522 performances on Broadway, the London production in 1987 completely revised the book adding five new songs while cutting four of the original, and will not be performed again. The official version has reverted to the original. London managed 645 performances. Critics were very mixed from 'Sondheim is a Hart looking for a Rodgers' to 'Follies is intermissionless and exhausting' while one critic 'Follies is a pastiche show, so brilliant as to be heartbreaking at times'.
APPLAUSE 1972
Lauren Bacall was so well loved in the London production that immediately after she left, all her costumes were ceremoniously burnt! One of the performers who took over the lead as Margo on tour in America was the actress who created the role of Eve in the original film - Anne Baxter.
JEEVES 1974
Not just a flop! A gigantic appalling disaster running at Her Majesty's. The first draft of this Alan Ayckbourn - Lloyd Webber musical fiasco ran for four hours! The director Eric Thompson was sacked days before the opening night, the show staggered along to empty houses for 38 performances, we left in the first interval. Lloyd Webber fled the country to escape and write, coming up with Evita.
BLOOD BROTHERS 1983
After the very mixed reviews in New York, the Producer Bill Kenwright against all the advice of American colleagues who are used to closing immediately after bad notices, was proved right by keeping it on and it ran for 840 performances.
THE RINK 1984
Though playing Broadway for 294 performances, four years later the British cast sunk their life savings into the show, sadly only managing 38 performances.
THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD 1985
Though receiving 5 Tony Awards and playing 608 perfrormances on Broadway the London production collapsed after 68. Ernie Wise took the lead in the UK after his partner Eric Morecambe died. One critic wrote 'Panto parody is Dickens of a disaster'. Incidentally, Ernie Wise was first to use a mobile phone in the UK.
ASPECTS OF LOVE 1989
Roger Moore was originally cast but left the part during rehearsals, possibly the right move for him and the production! An American critic? 'It generates as much heated passion as a trip to the bank'. Though playing for a year on Broadway, the production eventually lost $8m.
KING 1990
Adverse pre-production publicity concerning writers, directors, a producer and a leading actor either walking out or being fired over racial politics and money did not help this £2.5m fiasco. One critic wrote ' of such banality it is in itself a crime against humanity'. One of the numbers inspired by King himself I have a dream prompted one critic to say 'so did I but fought against temptation and stayed awake'. It closed after 6 weeks with an estimated loss of between £2.6m and £3.3m.
OSCAR WILDE - THE MUSICAL 2005
Opening at London's Shaw theatre was withdrawn after one performance. Critics were savage in their reviews, from 'Oscar Wilde turning in his grave' to 'hard to feel anything other than incredulous contempt'. Peter Blake who played Oscar, experienced a similar fate in 2004 with Money To Burn at Leicester Square's Venue Theatre, which closed after two.
AUDIENCE APPRECIATION
Longest applause goes to Placido Domingo which lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes for his performance in Othello in Vienna it continued throughout all of his encores.
Luciano Pavarotti managed 165 curtain calls for his 1988 performance in Donizetti's L'Elisir D'Amore at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. While Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev enjoyed 89 calls for their 1964 Swan Lake at the Vienese Staatsoper.
Juan Diego Florez the Peruvian Tenor after ecstatic applause forced Milan's La Scala Opera House to break a 70-year-old taboo and allowed him to give an encore of an acclaimed aria.
He brought the house down at Covent Garden in January '07 when he hit a series of nine perfect high Cs. There is a strict rule, however, at La Scala forbidding encores.
At the gala opening of Donizetti’s comic opera La Fille du Regiment on Tuesday 20th Feb '07 the ovation for Flórez was so overwhelming that Yves Abel, the Canadian conductor, was forced by public pressure to allow the tenor — playing Tonio — to sing the aria again.
SHORTEST WEST-END RUN?
No! not the more recent Oscar Wilde disaster at the Shaw theatre, being 'pulled' after one performance! But The Intimate Revue at the Duchess theatre, march 11th 1930. This debacle was unable to complete the performance as a great number of scene changes took more than 20 minutes to perform and seven sketches had to be cut to enable the show to finsh before midnight. Needless to say, it sank without trace
