Second Act Trouble: Behind the Scenes at Broadway's Big Musical Bombs

Like unhappy families, all musical comedy failures are different. Their genesis and demise are fascinating to read about: funny, sad, scary, and horribly human. Steven Suskin's book Second Act Trouble chronicles the life stories of 25 of them, one more interesting than the other. And not only to show queens, but also to anyone concerned with theater-all that behind-the-scenes stuff that reveals how the best-laid plans of mice and men can be swept into oblivion like so many mouse droppings.

Putting a musical on Broadway is both a very expensive and a very complex matter. Because it must recoup a usually imposing investment, it must please the great unwashed; but because no creators propose to peddle deliberate piffle rather than a work of artistic quality, it also has to satisfy the discerning connoisseurs and critics. Although it must aim both downward and upward, a house so divided against itself may not be the best recipe for filling houses.

A show may have been hopeless to begin with, but purblindly considered viable by some: authors, producers, angels, friends. Or a show may have a strong first act, but irredeemable second. Or it may suffer from so many makers' contradictory intentions that, in the course of profuse rewriting, recasting, redirecting or rechoreographing, it simply disintegrates.

In the older days of out-of-town tryouts, it may have received the wrong signals from what we like to believe are less discerning audiences and less expert critics; nowadays, during long New York previews, playing to, alas, no more enlightened audiences, it may generate a four-letter-word-of-mouth response. And much as we dislike to believe it, our own critics may prove imperceptive, leading to undeserved failures, e.g., Mack and Mabel.

Or a show may be underfinanced, or a producer of little faith may give up on it. Or something totally unpredictable may go wrong (think Kwamina), when an author-director may find his spouse and star in bed with the black leading man. But stars can produce a large variety of problems.

They can be out of control and unmanageable, as Jerry Lewis was in a new version of Helzapoppin. Or they may be more than willing, but, like Liv Ullmann in I Remember Mama, not good at singing. Or (sundry cases) movie or TV actors who are strangers to the stage.

Or it may be a mere lack of stars, as when Hallelujah, Baby, written for Lena Horne, had to make do with the less-known Leslie Uggams, who, ironically, proceeded to stardom.

And then there is that most melancholy cause for failure of a show with excellent pedigree, but whose creators, well past their prime, have become horses of a different color: old gray mares. Of this human as well as theatrical problem, Second Act Trouble provides ample examples.

Suskin's method is impeccable. A smart anthologist, he reprints the best possible contemporary eyewitness accounts, which he interlards, in different typeface and color, with his own post-mortem supplementary insights. These, whether of historical, critical, or merely gossip value, are always pertinent and sometimes deliciously impertinent. Suskin also supplies appetite-inducing prefatory notes and concluding observations, listing the number of performances, excerpts from reviews and whatever else you might wish to know.

Of course, everyone may have a favorite loser that did not make it into the book; mine happens to be Mata Hari, which managed to fail also off-Broadway, revised as Ballad for a Firing Squad. But never mind; there is plenty here to chew on and savor.

You can read John Simon on theatre every weekend at www.bloomberg.com.