At Joe Allen, a restaurant on Forty-sixth Street where denizens of the theatre world have been convening for nearly six decades, the walls are lined with posters of Broadway’s legendary duds. In the early days, for a show to make the display, it had to close in less than a week. Qualifying flops included such productions as “Drat! The Cat!,” a sex farce about a Victorian cat burglar (eight performances), and “Via Galactica,” a seventies rock opera about a trash collector who lives on an asteroid (seven performances).
Joe Allen specializes in comfort food—burgers, banana cream pie—and there is something oddly comforting, too, about its morbid choice of décor. No single misfire stands alone; failure is its own kind of rite of passage, to be commemorated along with success. The first poster that the restaurant ever hung, in 1965, was for “Kelly,” about a man who jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge and survives.
The show was such a fiasco that the writers sued the producers even before it premièred; it opened and closed on the same day. Not all unsuccessful shows, however, are spectacular implosions or paragons of bad taste. There is another, more common, type of Broadway misfire that is less dramatic but perhaps more disappointing—a production that has many things going for it, with a closely collaborative team working furiously until the last moment, never losing faith that it will find an audience.
Instead of crashing and burning, it opens and sputters. Some .