I know I mention BBC 4 Extra frequently, but name another 24-hour contemporary drama and comedy radio network with such variety.
The 2006 series More Fabulous Flops is hosted by Paul Roseby and first aired in 2006. The fourth and last episode of the series is available online through Friday.
While there’s some research and flair involved, the tone of the show is crass and condescending. Roseby snickers that many of the most egregious Broadway and West End failures were accidents waiting to happen, projects whose fatal flaws could be perceived way in advance of their openings.
Roseby takes sinister glee in chronicling the pick-failure In My Life at a time when the show was still running. The timing of More Fabulous Flops’ rerun is awkward, since In My Life’s creator Joe Brooks (who suffered a stroke after the show closed) committed suicide this past May, embroiled in a host of charges that he’d lured actresses to his apartment under false pretenses, then raped them.
Still, if you take the show on its own terms, you can’t beat some of the interviews Roseby gets—not just a defiant Brooks but Elaine Stritch, British DJ Mike Read (auteur of a musical about Oscar Wilde) and a range of dishy behind-the-scenesters of the sort which don’t often get quoted in documentaries. Rehearsal accompanists hold grudges too, you know.
The show jibes nicely with a book I just picked up as a “Kindle Single”: A 99-cent quick-read called Great West End Musical Flops. It’s in the spirit of Ken Mandelbaum’s 1992 classic Not Since Carrie—Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops, yet with none of the breadth, authority or bittersweet commentary.
Personally, I feel that flops are overrated. Few shows are uniformly bad, and while the talents of many are involved, they can easily be undone by the whims of individuals, often directors or producers but frequently also costume designers or orchestra leaders. It’s always disappointing to see a complicated team effort completely dismissed, when really its shortcomings should be dissected and studied.
On the other hand, as Roseby demonstrates again and again, “flops” is how theater people themselves assess and discuss shows. It’s their conversational currency. They delight in high-thrills anecdotes of tension and catastrophe. As big as the flops get (Carrie, the famed flop based on the Stephen King novel, is given such special attention on the final episode of the radio series that it’s left out of an earlier episode devoted expressly to horror musicals), everyone in the industry assumes there’s always a bigger one on the horizon.
I hope Roseby doesn’t take that as an invitation to produce a third series of More Fabulous Flops. Though I do wonder how far he’d push at a show like Spider-Man—so costly, and with so many casualties, yet currently still running. Or how, in light of his presumptions that some concepts are too weird to do anything but flop, how Roseby would explain the success of Book of Mormon, or Mamma Mia for that matter.