Product Description

If Broadway's triumphant musical hits are exhilarating, the backstage tales of Broadway failures are tantalizing soap operas in miniature. Second Act Trouble puts you with the creators in the rehearsal halls, at out-of-town tryouts, in late-night, hotel-room production meetings, and at after-the-fact recriminatory gripe fests. Suskin has compiled and annotated long-forgotten, first-person accounts of 25 Broadway musicals that stubbornly went awry. Contributions come from such respected writers as Patricia Bosworth, Mel Gussow, Lehman Engel, William Gibson, Lewis H. Lapham, and John Gruen. No mere vanity productions, these; you can't have a big blockbuster of failure, it seems, without the participation of Broadway's biggest talents. Caught in the stranglehold of tryout turmoil are Richard Rodgers, Jule Styne, Jerry Herman, Cy Coleman, Charles Strouse, John Kander, Mel Brooks, and even Edward Albee. The infamous shows featured include Mack and Mabel; Breakfast at Tiffany's; The Act; Dude; Golden Boy; Hellzapoppin'; Nick and Nora; Seesaw; Kelly; and How Now, Dow Jones.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #373076 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
What makes a musical go wrong? Theatrical manager and producer Suskin (Show Tunes; Broadway Yearbook series) attempts an answer in this lightly entertaining, obsessively edited compilation of newspaper and magazine articles and memoir excerpts, enlightened and corrected by Suskin's own commentary. A flop usually boils down to a few variables: conflicting artistic visions and/or personality conflicts, "star vehicles that failed," a nonexistent second act or costly rewrites and recastings. The earliest musical documented is Flying Colors (1932), the latest The Red Shoes (1993), with the majority from the '60s and '70s and no examples from the AIDS-torn '80s. Most of these gossip-laden, name-dropping, cattily amusing essays are too short to give more than the sketchiest outline of a show's trials and tribulations. Aspiring Broadway writers and producers looking for edification may be frustrated. The two exceptions are William Gibson's deeply felt excerpt about the posthumous musicalization of his close friend Clifford Odets's Golden Boy, an essay so literarily superior that Suskin refrains from his standard in-essay editorializing, and the book's grand finale, Lewis H. Lapham's long, funny, in-depth Saturday Evening Post article about the 1965 disaster Kelly. 100 color and b&w illus. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Interesting read if you would like to know more about Broadway flop musicals
This book, while interesting in its subject matter, is not an easy read as stated by an earlier reviewer. It is sometimes dry and rather longwinded in spots. It does provide information to a reader why many shows were not the successes their creators and producers hoped them to be.

A much more entertaining and fascinating book on the same subject is Ken Mandelbaum's NOT SINCE CARRIE: Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops. It is a reference tool, which I own, that I go back to quite often. Second Act Trouble was a book I borrowed from the public library. I am glad I read it, and I found it worthy of my time to have completed it. I enjoyed learning some new facts like Louis Jourdan was the original male lead in ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER, or that there was a brief thought of pairing up Ethel Merman and Mary Martin in 1973 for a musical comedy version of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE with a score by Rodgers and Harnick. However, Not Since Carrie has much more of a personal touch to it. It's like you're sitting down for coffee with Ken himself.

But this is a review for Second Act Trouble, not Not since Carrie. In the end, I recommend this book. However, just be aware that this look at flop musicals is a bit dull in spots and not as exciting as it could have been.

Read both of the books, and decide for yourself.

The Lazyman's Guide To Bad Broadway Musicals
This 2006 compendium of articles about problem musicals that fell apart on or near Broadway isn't a turkey on the order of "Kelly" or Jerry Lewis's revival of "Hellzapoppin", two of the 25 productions detailed inside. It's just misshapen and frustratingly incomplete.

For example, I'm not sure why Steven Suskin's name is on the spine of this book and Lewis H. Lapham's isn't. The Harper's editor has more to say in this book than Suskin does, as Lapham wrote a long piece on "Kelly" for the Saturday Evening Post back in 1965 which Suskin reprints at full length, covering 40 pages in all.

Other sections consist of shorter articles, from the New York Times, New York magazine, and other sources, detailing aspects of other failed productions often written just after or shortly before the play flopped. Suskin's contributions, here and elsewhere, consist entirely of brief introductions and often-snarky asides bracketed into the text.

"...[I]t struck me that these yellowing accounts - mostly from daily newspapers and weekly magazines, which went out-of-print the day or week after they were published - tell pretty convincing tales in themselves. Why not gather the best of them together, and put them in context, I wondered? Thus, 'Second Act Trouble'."

Suskin's idea of context is well on the spare side, though. He doesn't add much of anything about the musicals themselves. Were the songs bad? Was the acting at fault? Did it fail to find an audience? If the original author didn't say anything (and many of them focus as much on the money or key individuals behind the production as on the shows themselves), then Suskin doesn't, either, except to say whether the show was a "total", "partial", or "substantial" loss. It's a big hole, but not the only one in "Second Act Trouble."

Another abscess comes in the form of the musicals selected. They are a fairly narrow selection, all but three from the 1960s and 1970s. Many feature the same composers and producers. One producer, David Merrick, the famously shameless "Abominable Showman" and Suskin's one-time employer, shows up in nearly half the pieces.

Merrick makes for great copy, especially when he promotes "Subways Are For Sleeping" by getting a group of people who happened to have the same names as the New York theater critics of the time and producing an ad with their "raves" for the show. Alas, I learned more about Merrick reading this book than I did about how a musical may find itself on the Great Wrong Way.

It's too bad Suskin couldn't stir himself to do anything more with his materials. Even the illustrations reveal a lack of effort: Playbill covers and handbills for the shows constitute most of the art; with very few vintage photos.

It takes gall to publish a book with other people's thoughts and words and present it as one's own work; even more to make the subject one highlighting other people's failures. Merrick would be proud of his pupil. But this is one show you are better off skipping.

Doomed
I couldn't put it down and if this book had just collected only Lewis Lapham's long, long, "new journalism" article on the disastrous Moose Charnap flop KELLY! it would be worth buying. Lapham spares nobody and takes no prisoners and he got everyone to go on record about Ella Logan who must have been a termagant beyond compare. The producers let her go because they couldn't stand her continual "vulgarity" of all things. Kindly old Mel Brooks comes in, takes a look at her, and says, "Fire her." Sadly she had once been a great Broadway star, the original Sharon in FINIAN'S RAINBOW, now reduced to playing mothers (in 1965). Wonder if she's still with us, Suskin might have played fair and allowed us to air her grievances against the horrid KELLY! people. Oh well, SECOND ACT TROUBLE garners one great story after another, and I can't really say which one I like the best. Great monsters always make fantastic reading, and Jerry Lewis in HELLZAPOPPIN is right up there with Hitler and Stalin! There's one part where--he hates Lynn Redgrave--he has to rehearse a song with her, and he refuses to stand up while she's onstage with him so she's forced to sing while he sings with her lying flat on his back on the ground. Oh my, but after a few more chapters of this sort of behavior you begin to feel that being evil is necessary to make it on Broadway, and the squeaky wheels make the most noise.

Steven Suskin has an elastic sense of what shows are hits and which are flops, and some of the shows he covers in this book I was surprised to see he called flops. Some were critical darlings, some were pure spectacle, and some notorious flops like CARRIE aren't covered here. There are many occasions to wonder. Would HALLELUJAH BABY have been a hit if Lena Horne had played in it? I don't think so. Could Jerry Orbach have saved MACK AND MABEL? Who knows at this late date. Could Liv Ullmann be as horrid and egotistical as she is painted here, on the payroll of I REMEMBER MAMA? There goes another illusion shattered.

The book reveals that during the out of town tryouts for KWAMINA Star Sally Ann Howes had an affair with her co-star, and that this behavior was nothing new for Sally Ann for she had previously (a few months before) cheated on her husband, songwriter Richard Adler) with German heartthrob Maxmilian Schell backstage on the sets of a John Frankenheimer telefilm. I didn't even know who Sally Ann Howes is and I'm still enthralled! Adler eventually comes to forgive Howes in the long decades since, and she seems like an admirable woman in many ways, leaving her home to come back to NY and nurse Adler's son in the final months of his tragic illness. Good for you, Sally Ann, I like a woman who goes after what she wants, why, that's what made me a musical queen to begin with.