Turkey Stew

A flop. A stinker. Big money-losing, inadvertent-laughter-provoking, critically-bashed and/or audience-disdained fiascos. Turkeys. What is it about them that grabs us? Like the rubberneckers slowing down for a car wreck we buy up all the papers to read with glee the scathingly venomous diatribes and study box office figures, calculating nuts and percentages. And when we hear about these major disasters, we rush to get a glimpse before they're taken from us prematurely - gotta be able to say, "I was in the audience for closing night of Legs Diamond!" So it was only a matter of time before sites began to crop up on the Web dedicated to the (formerly?) abhorred.

Far more ambitious than sites devoted to a single flop are these two sites which offer surveys of all-time great losers.

John Bronston's Lost Musicals web site claims to be "dedicated to presenting and preserving the great lost musicals of the American Musical Theatre" - basically a bunch of turkeys! It's a short list at this site (which hasn't been updated since October of 1997), but with good details about each show, production team and cast lists. Curiously, although there are lists of the songs from each production, there are no synopses. The author's primary intent is to convince amateur and civic groups of the validity of these washouts, and so what we also get are little essays of the author's opinion of the pieces - although many of his suggestions would put the renting organizations in default of their licensing agreements. Included in his list are some oddities like the film, Dick Tracy, which he believes would make a good stage musical (and suggests how it should be done). But in the spirit of his intentions, he provides suggestions for contact information for people he believes would be helpful in securing rights. (By the way, the "Getting the rights to these Lost Musicals" link is broken; this is the correct link.)

Of far greater interest to devotees of dreckdom is the Steve Clark's big and growing, oft-updated Musicals That Didn't... site. "Didn't" what is never clearly stated, but we know that what they didn't do is get anywhere. This extensively cross-linked site lists floppolas by name, by date, even by theatre. Yup, you can find out which theatre has had the majority of the flops - at least based on the number of gobblers achieved with this week's input. He's also got a list of personnel and the flops they were attached to (which could aid in your research for the currently running Suite101.com Theatre contest). Each page devoted to a show contains the

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