West End musical flops

It was, bizarrely, a show created for Butlin’s holiday camps, having toured to Bognor Regis, Minehead and Skegness! Most of the cast were redcoats (or used to be) who worked at the camps. The score was written by the guy who wrote ‘Karma Chameleon’ and another member of the mid seventies group Sailor (anyone remember ‘Glass of Champagne’?). It was billed as a limited season but had greater hopes. In another weird twist it did get an American production but with a rewritten book and the original score pretty much binned. That version starred Chita Rivera, not as the friendly ghost but as the evil nemesis. A children’s show, really.

I LOVED Lend Me A Tenor.

The 90's was when i went to see everything and i saw pretty much all them, and bought the cast recording if there was one. I even bought the cd of Voyeurz....
2 of them were the only shows i have left at the interval - Tess of The Durbervilles and Hard Times. Tess was just a very long, tuneless mess. I have no idea how it came into the Savoy. There were only a few people in the theatre the night i went.

I really enjoyed most of the shows. The early 90's was when i was coming to London to see shows on my own and was in awe of most of the things i saw. I loved Always, Lautrec, Closer to Heaven, The Fields of Ambrosia, Children of Eden, Moby Dick, Hunting of The Snark....

I went and saw Betwixt at The Trafalgar Studios in 2011 only because Ellen Greene was in it but (to be honest) it was rubbish. Completely forgettable and badly acted.

She was in the original London production of Little Shop of Horrors (Claire Moore took over after six months).

Oh I loved this one! However, not a flop as it was always a limited run. I believe it extended actually.

OK so I know they were not in the West End .... but Carrie in Stratford was so insanely spectacularly bad that it was pure joy and is a memory I treasure to this day. And then the first crazy, messy performances of Les Mis at the Barbican which I have in my brain as being five or six hours long. Still kept going back to see it over and over however. And it got better.

Oh I think we can definitely consider 'Rent Remixed' as a flop. It was fabulously awful. So much talent involved and yet it was so utterly inept. Marvellous. I loved it!

Also saw"Bad Girls" - dire. "Peggy Sue got Married" ,"Acorn Antiques" & "The Girls". Glad I saw "The Go- Between" as a chance to see Michael Crawford. I enjoyed "The Wind in the Willows". I recommend the book "Most Close Saturday" if you are interested in flops.

I would have liked to see "Betty Blue Eyes" & "Lend me a Tenor" but at the time I couldn't afford a ticket & didn't join papering till after. They both looked interesting at West End Live.

The Women in White can hardly be called a WestEnd flop. It ran for over a year and half at the Palace theatre. Without a trace? It was just done again at the Charing Cross Theatre.

Lend Me A Tenor would probably be classed as a flop but it was such a great show. It just didn't sell. It was on at the Gielgud Theatre for a couple of months in 2011. That's a show thats sunk without a trace. Which I don't believe should've. 

I wish i had seen Out Of The Blue. It opened at the Shaftesbury with ZERO marketing. It appeared overnight and closed 17 days later, starring big musical theatre names of the time. If you're going to produce a musical in a huge theatre, you'd think that marketing it in advance would be a good place to start.

The Shaftesbury was the cursed theatre of the 90's. Nothing lasted there
Bat Boy just died a death in a theatre that size. It's a very small show and the set didn't even fill the stage. Even the cast knew it was never going to survive there.

I saw Napoleon and The Far Pavillions there too. They were trying to be big epic storys, with big songs like Les Mis, Napoleon has some good stuff in it, but i remember very little else. And did it use a huge silk sheet that covered the whole stage at some point?? Can anyone else confirm that or am i confusing it with someone else??

La Cava was very good, another 90's show that used big epic themes and music. Its big set was these huge wooden structures that moved in all directions, and very similar to what they used in Martin Guerre. It was the west end debut of  Ben Forster and Luke Evans, now a big film star, and he has a great song in the 2nd half. He has such a powerful voice. Also the lead, Julie Alanah Brighton (what happened to her??) has a fantastic 11 o'clock song called Say Goodbye. It opened, transferred from the Victoria Palace to the Piccadilly Theatre and closed within 9 months.

I loved that Leonardo The Musical was basically funded by bird droppings!! It's main investor was an island that made it's money exporting bird sh*t. Something that wasn't lost on the critics that saw it...

Always - The Story of Edward and Wallis Simpson, has a great score, IMO. I still listen to parts of it today and i think it holds up well, apart from the song sung by Sheila Fergusson, about the Carousel of Love, or something similar...

The Hunting of The Snark was ahead of it's time. It had a huge orchestra on stage, that lifted on a huge set piece and was one of the first shows to use projections for the set. They were fantasic and really created am atmosphere of the story, way better than what they did in The Woman in White.

I was 17 when i started discovering all these shows and i really did like most of them alot. Back then i went to see everything ASAP, bought the cast albums and listened to all of them on repeat. I just dont do that now.