Let's Talk About Failure, Baby

Happy New Year! This is when we make resolutions and forge plans to achieve great success in the coming twelve months. That's why, contrarian that I am, this first post of 2021 will be about failure.

After the 2020 we all had, can you blame me?

I love stories about failure. They prove that the universe is a random, weird, mostly cruel, sometimes kind, totally unpredictable place. I'm a connoiseur of the genre. 

Let's paraphrase Leo Tolstoy who wrote that all happy families are basically the same while all unhappy families are unhappy in unique and different ways. So it is with success and failure: all roads to success are basically the same and straightforward (the idea, the struggle, the setback, the breakthrough, the triumph) but the roads to failure are much more bizarre and interesting.

I've chronicles my share of failure stories on here over the years -- this blog being perhaps a prime example of failure.

So here's another one: the story of a musical version of Frankenstein that premiered exactly 40 years ago today -- and closed after one night. Hopes were high that this show, the most expensive musical of all time at the time, would start 1981 on Broadway with a creative and financial bang. Instead, it failed -- the reviews were terrible, there was no advance box office sales, it was a disaster by every metric. The producers saw that this show had no future except red ink and empty seats so they killed it that night. Interestingly, this show had a notable cast (some of whom were fired before the show actually played its one offiicial show) including future Oscar-winner Dianne Wiest, the late great David Dukes (not to be confused with the white supremicist), and a guy named William Converse-Roberts who would go on to be the ex-husband on The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. The creators would go on to have decent careers but no big Broadways triumphs. But on the night of January 4, 1981, a month after John Lennon's murder and Ronald Reagan's inaugeration, the future for everyone on the show looked dark.

But even though this showed was a bad flop, it makes for a great -- and successful -- story.

P.S. The whole horror genre has had a lousy history on Broadway. Whereasa it's a staple of the movies, theater audiences aren't interested. Fascinating how a whole genre can work in one medium but not in another.