Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops

PROLOGUE

CARRIE: FIRST NEW YORK PREVIEW, APRIL 28, 1988

Photo Credit: Peter Cunningham

Word is out among New York’s flop connoisseurs: Don’t miss the first preview of Carrie. During its tryout in Stratford, England, Broadway diva Barbara Cook jumped ship, and some who made the trip to Stratford reported back that Carrie was a lulu. Carrie postponed its New York previews more than once, and for a while it looked as if Carrie might never begin performances here at all. Finally Carrie sets a date to begin: April 28, 1988. To those who care about collecting flops, attending the performance is de rigueur; some present are saying that this could be the only performance of Carrie in New York, and such gossip gains credence when the opening of the house is delayed for half an hour.

Another ominous note sounds in the Virginia Theatre on West Fifty-second Street: the entire auditorium has been painted black. Why? We are plunged into darkness, and the lights come up on a white enameled box with side panels capable, we discover, of rotating into mirrors. In togalike white exercise outfits, a dozen ladies—most looking too old and hard for the high-school girls they are meant to be—are engaging in strenuous aerobics under the guidance of gym teacher Miss Gardner (Darlene Love), who is clad in a Greek-style lounge outfit. The scene, in which the girls sing the intense In, a song about the pressures of adolescence, does not begin to resemble any high school on earth. Clearly, something is wrong.

A row of translucent, revolving panels representing showers is hydraulically borne aloft, the girls rising into the air as they sing out their romantic fantasies in Dream On. The stage is filled with smoke, although there is no water, and these girls take showers in bras and panties. Carrie White (Linzi Hateley), her plump body covered by a towel, discovers that she is bleeding, and the girls taunt her for her ignorance of menstruation. A light bulb mysteriously explodes overhead. Why? Left alone, Carrie performs the title number, one of the most overwrought and lengthy solos ever in a Broadway musical, in which she expresses her isolation and longing for acceptance. Some theatregoers gape at the stage—others give Hateley an ovation.

The scene shifts to the White home, which for some reason appears to consist solely of a wooden floor, a trapdoor, and a chair. Carrie’s mother, Margaret (Betty Buckley), is discovered prostrate on the floor. Margaret is a religious fanatic, yet her fashionable, all-black ensemble includes stylish boots. She sings an eerily beautiful hymn, Open Your Heart, in which she is soon joined by her daughter. When Mrs. White learns what transpired in the shower room, she interprets the incident as evidence of Carrie’s sin and begins stalking Carrie all over the stage as the two perform a grandly operatic duet, And Eve Was Weak. Suddenly, something wonderful happens in the show: there’s searing writing and a tremendous performance by Buckley and Hateley. Margaret forces Carrie down through the trapdoor, sparks fly up, and Buckley finishes sola to a wall of bravos.

Now an assemblage of automobile fronts and headlights moves on. Coupling high-school kids sing Don’t Waste the Moon. Good girl Sue expresses her regrets about mocking Carrie, while bad girl Chris sings of her hatred for Carrie. The scene is jarringly cute, totally out of style with what we’ve already seen. Doubts about director Terry Hands’ control of the evening’s tone become exacerbated.

On a bare stage, Margaret and Carrie perform Evening Prayers, mother and daughter expressing their love and torment in pop-religioso music of passionate beauty. Moving back to the gymnasium set, the show’s only moment of warmth arrives as Miss Gardner (in gym attire but with white high-heeled pumps) helps Carrie to believe that love will one day find her, in the song Unsuspecting Hearts. What is Carrie? So far, half of it is thuggish camp, half of it is gorgeous music-theatre.

The evening goes off the track completely in the next scene, set on a bare stage referred to in the program as Night Spot, supposedly a typical gathering place for middle-American high-school students. But the kids, in studded leather, are moving in a kind of early-middle neurotic disco. Apparently they date not at the local soda shoppe but in a back-room bar. Chris, bad girl in red body stocking, plots revenge on Carrie with help from hip and mean boyfriend Billy. Good girl Sue, in pink body stocking, persuades sweet and nice boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the prom. By now, anyone unfamiliar with the Stephen King novel on which the musical was based, or the subsequent film version, wouldn’t have the slightest idea what’s going on, or who the characters are, or even where the show is taking place. Could Hands’ staging be a perverse put-on?

Four glimpses of the typical, middle-American teenagers of Carrie: Above dancing frenzy, to the tune of In. Below, the shower scene, with the young taunting ignorant Carrie, who has just experienced her first period.

Photo Credit: Peter Cunningham

Don’t Waste the Moon: Is this Carrie or Bye Bye Birdie?

Photo Credit: Peter Cunningham

Do Me a Favor: Is this a malt shop or a leather bar?

Photo Credit: Peter Cunningham

Another vivid mother–daughter scene closes Act One. Carrie informs her mother that she’s been invited to the prom, triggering Mrs. White’s lurid recollections of the sin that produced Carrie. The song, I Remember How Those Boys Could Dance, is ravishing. But when mother forbids daughter to go, the show becomes unhinged again. The stage floor opens, and Carrie, hands aflame—yes, her hands really appear to be aflame—stands in front of a large strip of simulated fire behind which her mother is pinned. Stephen King buffs know, of course, that Carrie has the power of telekinesis. But as these powers have barely been hinted at until now, the rest of the audience is bewildered—why are Carrie’s hands aflame, and what just happened to the stage?

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The buzz among habitual first-previewgoers is contradictory. Some have already written the show off, some find it alternately thrilling and ridiculous, some can’t believe what they’re seeing. Those willing to suspend judgment up to now find that they no longer can as Act Two opens, according to the program on The Pig Farm. It is with this scene that Carrie stakes its claim to a special niche in musical-theatre history. Billy slaughters pigs for Chris (we hear oinks through the sound system) to obtain the blood they will use to humiliate Carrie. In the number, called Out for Blood, boys in leather perform dangerous choreography around and over the fire strip, which doubles here as a pig trough, chanting the refrain Kill the pig, pig, pig. Chris sings, It’s a simple little gig/You help me kill a pig, and Billy, topless and with his hair in braids, smears his chest repeatedly with the blood of the squealing pigs. When the number ends, a few applaud dutifully, but most look at the stage or at each other with mouths open, just like the audience at Springtime for Hitler, the show-within-the-movie in The Producers.

A nightmare from which no show could possibly recover, the number is followed by the show’s most dispensable sequence: Sue sings It Hurts to Be Strong, about how hard it is to stand up to one’s peers, and it’s a good opportunity to sneak out for a cigarette. This is followed by Carrie alone, flanked by two ultraviolet tubes. As she prepares for the prom, Carrie sends her hairbrush, hand mirror, powder puff, shoes, and gown dancing around her in a display of black lighting magic. The number is cutesy rather than ominous, the tone way off; Carrie’s powers are supposed to be expressions of her emotional upheaval, not a second-rate magic act. Carrie leaves, and Mrs. White sings a lovely, melancholy solo, When There’s No One, in an improbably low-cut negligee.

Now we’re at the prom, and a mirrored, rotating ball is, for some reason, secured to the floor. Another overchoreographed sequence culminates in a Verdi-like assemble in which all the principal characters voice their sentiments. Chris’s big moment of revenge is so poorly staged it gets laughs: Billy runs on and plunks a small bucket of raspberry topping over Carrie’s head, instead of the elaborately rigged device of the Carrie novel and film.

Next, in The Destruction, Carrie, hydraulically lifted on a white platform, extends her arm, and laser beams shoot out over the audience. What looks like a plastic shower curtain traps the revelers, and they feign death throes. A roof descends (with a hole cut so that Hateley, still aloft, is not decapitated), and when the lights come up, the roof has become an enormous white staircase covering the entire stage and disappearing up into the flies. Where are we? In heaven? On the high-school steps? At Jacob’s Ladder? Jacob’s Pillow? Mrs. White, in a cocktail dress, descends the steps, singing the title song as a lullaby. Still singing, she takes out a knife and stabs Carrie. Carrie touches her mother lightly and her mother falls dead. Carrie descends the stairs; crawling backward, she smears blood all over the white steps, drawing barely suppressed laughter from the audience. Carrie joins Sue downstage. Sue comforts the dying Carrie, Mrs. White lies dead on the platform, and as the lights dim to black, boos ring out from the upper balcony while below, others begin an ovation.

As the audience files out, some appear thrilled, others appalled; the word most frequently bandied about is unbelievable. For show freaks, this has been a night unlike any other, the kind for which they have waited a lifetime. They cannot wait to get home to call their friends, and phone lines, particularly those on the West Side, will continue to steam for hours to come. These fans are aware that what they have just witnessed has set a new standard, one to which all future musical flops will be compared and found waiting. The ad copy, which read There’s Never Been a Musical Like Her, has proved prophetic. These fans will tell their friends to get to the Virginia Theatre immediately, and many of them will return to Carrie two or three times during the two weeks of previews that remain. Carrie has become an instant legend.

Sylvia Syms, Romo Vincent, and Susan Johnson in Whoop—Up

Photo Credit: N.Y. Public Library

One

CATASTROPHES & CAMP

"Nor will I say that Portofino is the worst musical ever produced, because I’ve only been seeing musicals since 1919."

—Walter Kerr, Herald Tribune

"Kelly is a bad idea gone wrong."

—Walter Kerr, Herald Tribune

"Like such famous Broadway fiascos as Kelly, Rachael Lily Rosenbloom and Rockabye Hamlet, this one has the courage to meet vulgarity far more than halfway."

—Frank Rich, The New York Times, on Marlowe

There are flop musicals that cause those who remember them to evince regret over how far short their creators fell of their admirable goals. Other flops cause fans to speak fondly of a wonderful score, an unforgettable star performance, some great sets. Certain flops can provoke tirades from those horrified at such utter incompetence. Sometimes the mere mention of a flop musical evokes chuckles at the silliness and stupidity conjured up by its title. But no matter what the degree of awfulness, there’s no use denying that flops exert a perverse fascination. There is a decided cachet attached to having seen the musicals to be discussed herein, and musical-theatre lovers are often more eager to discuss a show that played for three performances than one that played three thousand.

Flops are just as much a part of musical-theatre history—indeed, a bigger part—as hits and often involve the same creators. Almost no one in the theatre is immune to flops, and the finest writers, directors, stars, producers, and designers have all had big ones. These theatrical artisans devoted just as much time and energy to their bombs as to their triumphs. And those who have never stopped playing the original cast recordings made from these flops never tire of debating what went wrong or attempting to relate to the uninitiated what it was like to be there.

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Carrie was every category of flop rolled into one, capable of provoking all of the reactions mentioned above and then some. But if Carrie’s unprecedented highs and lows provided it with the immediate aura of legend, it was only the latest in a long series of classic catastrophes. Musical flops are a seasonal Broadway staple, but for a variety of reasons, some are not soon forgotten: their titles are summoned up by aficionados as exemplars of disgrace, humiliation, and utter chaos.

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Say flop in a word association test, and the title that might come up most frequently, at least prior to Carrie, is Kelly (Broadhurst; Feb. 6, ’65; 1). The most notorious flop of postwar musicals, it is curiously not one of the all-time worst shows—or at least it wasn’t when it opened in Philadelphia in December 1964. Kelly’s notoriety is more the result of its aftermath than of its intrinsic quality.

Based on the true-life story of Steve Brodie, who may or may not have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1880s, Kelly was the work of Eddie Lawrence (book and lyrics) and Moose Charlap (music). Charlap’s career had already encompassed two flops, Whoop-Up and The Conquering Hero, and his music for Mary Martin’s Peter Pan had been augmented by the work of other writers. Lawrence, a performer, had never written a musical before—and never would again. Kelly went through numerous possible producers, directors (Lindsay Anderson, Peter Coe), and stars (Richard Harris, Gene Kelly, Tommy Sands, Frank Gorshin) before it finally was taken up by David Susskind, Joseph E. Levine, and Daniel Melnick, none of whom had ever produced a Broadway musical. They hired Herbert Ross, a talented choreographer whose only direction thus far had been his takeover of two flops, House of Flowers and The Gay Life, from other directors. Canadian actor Don Francks was hired for the title role, and Ella Logan, who had not appeared on Broadway since creating the lead in Finian’s Rainbow in 1947, signed on as Ma Kelly. Anita Gillette got the ingenue lead: she had recently opened The Gay Life by jumping off a bridge (the scene and her part were cut on the road); bridges, clearly, were not to be lucky for Gillette, whose career would be beset by flop musicals.

As the curtain rises on Kelly, young busboy Hop Kelly has already chickened out of three previous attempts to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge and in so doing has placed himself in considerable jeopardy with Bowery gamblers. Kelly ultimately foils the gamblers’ plans to substitute a dummy in his place, accepting the challenge and triumphing at the end.

By the time Kelly reached Boston, the producers had brought in three new writers (one of whom was Mel Brooks) to fashion a largely new book. Lawrence and Charlap promptly took the producers to court to prevent them from opening the show on Broadway unless their material was restored. A Supreme Court judge ruled that arbitration was in order but that the opening could not be stopped. Susskind, who was heard in Boston to say, We haven’t got a Chinaman’s chance—the truth is this is a bad show, now told the Daily News, "I predict it’ll be the biggest hit since Hello, Dolly!" Susskind invited a group of clairvoyants onto his weekly television show the week before the New York opening; each of the five declared that Kelly would be a smash.

Logan, who withdrew from the show when her part was whittled away, attended the opening, as did Charlap, who sat upstairs with his lawyer and a tape recorder. Howard Taubman of the New York Times began his notice by saying, "Ella Logan was written out of Kelly before it reached the Broadhurst Theatre Saturday night. Congratulations, Miss Logan." The reviews were uniformly terrible, far worse than they had been for the show’s two tryout engagements, and Kelly’s opening night performance was its last.

Three major catastrophes. Above, Ella Logan (before she was written out) with Don Francks in Kelly. Below, the Playbills for those twin disgraces of 1972, Dude and Via Galactica.

Photo Credit: N.Y. Public Library

Many worse shows had opened before, but Kelly’s failure turned into a media event. The show became the subject of a lengthy, fly-on-the-wall piece in the Saturday Evening Post; in it, featured lead Eileen Rodgers was said to have broken into tears in Philadelphia and exclaimed, "I wish I was back in Tenderloin. It was a flop, but at least people were friendly." Newspapers trumpeted the fact that Kelly was the most expensive ($650,000) failure in Broadway history. Perhaps for the first time, it was brought home to the public the stakes involved, and the decline of a system that could produce an evening so obviously headed for doom. Kelly was scary—it made people ask, How do these things happen?

From the time they went to court to stop the Broadway opening to this day, the writers of Kelly maintain that theirs was a promising show destroyed on the road by lack of producing know-how. In its original form, Kelly aspired to a Threepenny Opera-like grit mixed with the colorful lowlifes and lovable hoods of Guys and Dolls. There are interesting lyrics and some decent attempts at local color and salty dialogue. But it’s a strange and perilously thin story, and one is never made to care about Hop and his plight. Moreover, Kelly was unwise to hinge its entire plot around an event—the bridge jump—that could not possibly be shown on stage. If Kelly in Philly was better than Kelly on Broadway, it was never strong to begin with.

Kelly’s score contains one notable song, Never Go There Anymore, an ambitious ballad that extends into a dramatic scene in which the hero recalls his slum upbringing. Otherwise, the score is not much more interesting than the story. The only recording of Kelly is a demo recorded by the authors and commercially released fifteen years later, an indication of how desperate someone was to put out an album of the most famous flop of them all. With its tinny sound and wailing voices, it is arguably the most unlistenable show record ever released.

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Kelly is mostly famous for being famous; it was unpromising from its inception. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Majestic; Dec. 12, ’66; closed in previews), though, would seem to have had everything going for it. It was produced by David Merrick, its book and direction were by Abe Burrows, and its score was by Bob Merrill, who had already written Take Me Along, Carnival, and two songs interpolated into Merrick’s Hello, Dolly! during its tryout. It starred two glamorous television names, Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain, and was based on Truman Capote’s heartbreaking novella, which had already been made into a hugely successful 1961 film. Indeed, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was the most anticipated musical of the 1966–67 season, with an advance sale far exceeding that of Cabaret, I Do! I Do!, or The Apple Tree, other autumn ’66 musical attractions.

Capote set his book in the forties and made it a flashback narrated by an unnamed writer, obviously Capote himself, who is fascinated by his eccentric neighbor Holly Golightly but who has no romantic relationship with her. In the movie version, reset to the present, writer Paul falls in love with Holly, the attraction complicated by a newly invented affair between Paul and a rich, married older woman. The film also was given a happy ending in which flighty Holly finally commits to someone and stays with Paul; in the novel, Holly leaves the country forever. The film, if far less moving than the novel, represented a capable job of turning a plotless mood piece into a conventional sixties romantic comedy.

Originally, Merrick had asked Capote to adapt his own novella for the musical stage, but Capote, who had already adapted one of his own short stories into the book for the musical flop House of Flowers, declined. Joshua Logan was asked to direct, and Nunnally Johnson wrote a book for the show, which was rejected. When Burrows agreed to write a new book and to direct, the project became a reality. It’s worth noting, however, that Merrill had already written most of his score—to Johnson’s book—before Burrows was hired.

Under the title Holly Golightly, the musical played two tryout engagements, in Philadelphia and Boston, to mostly negative reviews. The critics were particularly harsh on the show’s leading lady. Mary Tyler Moore told the New York Post, I’ve got to clear my name. We were a month in Boston. It seemed like fourteen. You can imagine how I felt having to go on every night when I read that Tammy Grimes or Diahann Carroll would replace me. Tammy was never in Boston waiting to take over as reported. And Miss Carroll was the original choice for the part. In Philadelphia, they made Holly very tough. The critics rapped us for that, so in Boston we made her sweet and they rapped us for that. David Merrick has been wonderful to me. With those reviews, I’m sure other producers would have replaced me.

Capote saw the show in Boston and told Women’s Wear Daily, I don’t like the score or the leading lady. It was clear that drastic measures were called for: Burrows, known as the ace play doctor of his time, seemed unable to fix his own show, so Merrick took the surprising step of asking Edward Albee—whose only experience with musicals was as coauthor of the libretto for a forgotten 1961 off-Broadway musical adaptation of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener—to write a new book. Merrick and Albee wanted Burrows to stay on as director, but Burrows walked out when he read Albee’s words to Kevin Kelly in the Boston Globe near the end of the tryout: All those awful jokes will be thrown out, and I hope to substitute some genuine wit. The characters, from Holly down, will be redefined, and she won’t have any of those borscht-circuit lovers she’s saddled with now.

Joseph Anthony took over the direction; Larry Kert and others joined the cast, while other performers were dropped; the score was substantially revised to fit Albee’s script; and the show, now called Breakfast at Tiffany’s, limped into New York. In spite of disastrous reports from the road, nothing could stop people from buying tickets for what they still believed to be a sure thing, and the advance sale continued to build.

After watching the first Broadway preview on December 12, 1966, during which members of the audience walked out or talked back to the actors, Merrick decided to cancel the scheduled December 26 opening. He allowed the show to play three more previews—performances to which the Broadway cognoscenti flocked—then called a press conference to make an unprecedented statement: "Rather than subject the drama critics and the theatregoing public—who invested one million dollars in advance sales—to an excruciatingly boring evening, I have decided to close. Since the idea of adapting Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the musical stage was mine in the first place, the closing is entirely my fault and should not be attributed to the three top writers who had a go at it. With tongue in cheek, Merrick added that he was shutting the show down because Tiffany’s the jeweler promised to pay off the loss. Their competitor, Cartier’s, wanted me to keep it open to damage Tiffany’s."

The announcement made Merrick a hero. Never before had a producer admitted at this stage that his show was a disaster and stated that he did not wish to cheat his customers. No show had ever been stopped prior to its Broadway opening with an advance sale as large as that secured by Tiffany’s. The show cost $500,000, but thanks to sell-out business in both road engagements, it wound up losing $425,000, thus making it a bomb that actually returned a portion of its investment.

Just as remarkable is the fact that the New York Times actually ran a semireview, written by second-stringer Dan Sullivan, the day after the final preview. Sullivan wrote, The preview audience left the Majestic immeasurably depressed … Both [Moore and Chamberlain] are troupers, but neither was ready for a Broadway musical.

Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain, the stars of Holly Golightly, later Breakfast at Tiffany’s. They’re smiling, but that’s because this photo was taken for the Philadelphia Playbill before all the trouble started.

Many mediocre-to-poor musicals, by dint of hefty advance sales, opened in the sixties and managed to play out a season. How did a show so promising become such a disgrace that it had to be withdrawn? Burrows’ version went astray because it attempted to make Capote’s ethereal character study into a boisterous, conventional, sixties-style Broadway show. The character of Holly, more annoying than charming, got lost in a series of mostly extraneous production numbers. Humor was in very short supply, and Merrill failed to musicalize the most dramatic or emotional moments of the story. The road version was simply not very entertaining.

Albee took an unconventional and fascinating approach that managed to destroy every scene, every moment. In Albee’s virtually plotless book, Holly becomes a character being created by Jeff Claypool (as the writer was called in both Burrows’ and Albee’s versions). Jeff invents Holly as he goes along, instructing, rebuking, interrupting, and correcting her throughout. In their scenes together, Holly and Jeff are no longer people, but a writer and the character he’s improvising. The central conceit is particularly confusing when Jeff, supposedly inventing the action, becomes upset with what’s happening to Holly: if he’s making up the story, why does he allow these things to happen? In addition, Albee’s hardbitten Holly was even less suited to Moore’s personality than Burrows’ had been. Deadly to any possible dramatic interest, Albee’s script did include one amusing in-joke: after a television news report about Holly’s arrest for her unwitting involvement in a drug ring, the newscaster introduces a review of a new David Merrick musical, based on Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and called Cherry!

Both versions contained some good songs, but Merrill’s work was too conventional for the material, and people missed the film’s hit song, Moon River. Capote’s touching heroine never got the imaginative musicalization she might have had and didn’t even receive the successful, if revisionist, treatment she got in the movie. Hiring Albee to fix what was already a deeply troubled show was the wrong decision, and by the time it reached Broadway, Breakfast at Tiffany’s had gone wildly astray. Advance ticket buyers lined up for refunds, not quite believing that it could have been that bad.

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Capote’s colorful Holly and the success of the Tiffany’s movie meant that a Broadway musical would inevitably follow, and in fact, there was never anything wrong with the idea of Tiffany’s as a musical. But Peter Allen playing Prohibition-era gangster Legs Diamond was an idea doomed to failure from the start. Allen and his close friend Charles Suppon began to write the book for Legs Diamond (Mark Hellinger; Dec. 26, ’88; 64), dimly based on the 1960 Warner Brothers film The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, in 1983. The show that got to Broadway five years later, just months after Carrie, was one of the greatest personal humiliations Broadway has ever witnessed.

Singer—songwriter Allen is a star with a passionate following who has on occasion been known to fill Radio City Music Hall but who otherwise lacks hit records and is not really all that famous. In 1971, Allen had appeared in a Broadway flop called Soon, a rock opera which closed after three performances and which also featured Richard Gere, Barry Bostwick and Nell Carter; but by the time of Legs Diamond he was much better known, and Legs Diamond was meant to be the vehicle that would allow him to make the transition from concert performer to Broadway star.

After a 1987 workshop of the Allen–Suppon book, Harvey Fierstein, who had already won Tony Awards for his play Torch Song Trilogy and the book for La Cage aux Folks, was hired to write a new script. (Suppon retained coauthorship credit, thus qualifying as the only librettist in Broadway history to also win the Coty Award for women’s wear design.) The first book had been dark and serious; it was Fierstein’s idea—an idea that ultimately made little sense—to make his hero a hoofer in Prohibitionera New York who only becomes a gangster to further his desire to break into show business.

Initially, Legs Diamond was scheduled for out-of-town tryouts in various cities, but David Mitchell’s needlessly intricate set designs made a tour impossible; the cancellation of the pre-Broadway tour would prove to be the most crucial of many producing errors. Also abandoned early on were elaborate black art designs, whereby bullets and the front pages of newspapers would have hurtled across the footlights in 3-D fashion.

As the only new book musical on the horizon when the 1988–89 season began, Legs Diamond built up a huge advance sale throughout the summer. The first public sign of trouble came in August when the show’s choreographer, Michael Shawn, was dismissed and replaced by Alan Johnson. Shawn later took the show’s producers to court, claiming that he was fired because he had tested positive for the AIDS virus and the producers feared he would be unable to continue working. Long after Legs Diamond closed, the case was settled out of court, and Shawn was awarded $175,000. He died in April 1990.

After several postponements, eight weeks of previews began in late October. Poisonous word of mouth spread almost instantly; even those who had little interest in Broadway musicals became aware that Legs Diamond was a dog. More unusual was the series of articles that appeared in major newspapers which let those who had not already heard know how bad the show was supposed to be.

Not since Merrily We Roll Along in 1981 did a show experience such a troubled preview period and undergo such radical change. Within a week a leading role, that of Legs’ wife, Alice (Christine Andreas), had been eliminated. Then Legs’ brother, Eddie (Bob Stillman), a character central to the 1960 film, was also dropped. Allen’s lack of acting ability was addressed late in previews by giving him monologues that enabled him to talk directly to the audience as he would in his club act. Audiences were paying fifty dollars a head to see a chaotic show in constant flux.

Director Robert Allan Ackerman, who had directed the workshop but had no experience with big-time musicals, retained his job throughout previews, probably because no better director was willing to take over. After several canceled opening dates, Legs Diamond premiered the night after Christmas. Standing on his own coffin at the beginning of Act Two, Legs said, I’m in show biz. Only a critic can kill me! A critic? The reviews were unanimously horrendous. The advance sale, which had filled most of the theatre during previews, fell away, and the show closed after eight weeks, losing over $5 million. At the final performance, Allen thanked everyone, saying, I guess I’m not going to be able to do this at the Tonys.

Warning bells should ring when a show’s creators announce that they only want to give the audience a good, old-fashioned, escapist time. The creators of Legs thought they were providing the public with a respite from pretentious, overblown British pop-opera spectacles, but even the weakest of those imports was more entertaining than Legs. From previews to opening, the show had progressed from an unprofessional, often incomprehensible embarrassment to a more polished, clearer embarrassment. Dull and above all humorless, it was a star vehicle without a star. Allen looked ridiculous throughout and was particularly unconvincing romancing the many ladies supposedly a part of his life. His music wasn’t all bad, but his lyrics were often awkward and didn’t always rhyme. Cabaret goddess Julie Wilson, forced to speak entirely in B-movie clichés, continued her record of creating roles only in Broadway bombs (Jimmy, Park) but provided Legs with its only touch of