Must Close Saturday: The Decline and Fall of the British Musical Flop by Adrian Wright (review)

Adrian Wright's Must Close Saturday: The Decline and Fall of the British Musical Flop was commissioned by Michael Middeke of Boydell Press. Must Close Saturday examines 171 (give or take a few throwaway references) theatrical flops of post-Oliver! London in chronological order. It's a breezy, engaging beach read of a text, and the thesis seems to be "things fail for a variety of reasons, from being overly innovative to overly conventional, overly ambitious, or just plain bad." The book also lacks a conclusion, ending abruptly with the statement "the British musical flop has always had its surprises" (255).

In the preface, Wright questions the very existence of the volume: "It was in 1977 that the Guardian took the trouble to ask Lionel Bart 'Whatever happened to the British musical?' . . . Bart replied, 'It stopped when I stopped. It was big when Gilbert and Sullivan were doing some; when Noel Coward was doing some. It was big when I was doing some.' I wish I had seen this brilliantly concise analysis of what happened to the British musical in the second half of the twentieth century before attempting to capture the mystery in a book of 140,000 words" (xi). Wright goes on to explain his definition of a flop (a show running under 250 performances) and then contradicts that definition by saying long-running shows that are financially successful but horrible plays should also be defined as flops (the book should extend the discussion likening the prediction of theatrical success to picking stocks). This Hamburg Dramaturgy of disastrous musicals features stars on their way up (Albert Finney in The Lily White Boys, Jane Birkin in Passion Flower Hotel) and on their way down (Howard Keel in Ambassador, Betty Grable in Belle Starr), the tanking of once-promising careers (Lionel Bart and Sandy Wilson, post-Oliver! and The Boy Friend), and a cavalcade of broken dreams: a crowdfunded show about Bernadette Soubirous, a bio-musical about Grimaldi seventeen years in the making that stumbled through twenty-three performances, and a "smutty folly rejected by twenty-one London producers" (212) that closed in two nights. Wright details stars suffering from pneumonia and nervous breakdowns, personality clashes, lockouts, bad decisions, and a smorgasbord of quotations from scathing reviews. Occasionally, reading bad review upon review isn't entertaining and just leads to feelings of sadness for the lost livelihoods and general humiliation of all involved in a given musical flop.

While eminently quotable—"a sort of sex musical that never achieved more than half cock" (49); "a more noisy than usual British musical written for the middle aged" (52)—and enjoyable to read aloud to friends—"lyrics that rhymed 'factotum' with 'grab Hitler by the scrotum'" (175); "Godammit, those chorus boys are still thumbing their waistcoats in 2016!" (126)—Must Close Saturday is a bit unwieldy as an academic text. The alphabetical appendix would benefit from including one-sentence plot summaries (or even brief descriptions) of each of the flops (the book frequently reads as though it was written for people who were in the audience and/or remembered living through the included musicals being dragged by the press). It also would be helpful if the appendix included page numbers so that the reader does not have to use first the general index to find an actor or director and then the appendix of plays to find the title of the play featuring said actor and the year it was produced and then the index of plays to find the section of the book detailing what went catastrophically wrong with the production, which makes for a slightly frustrating research experience. After reading through 255 pages of flops it becomes difficult to distinguish Wild, Wild Women (a musical adaptation of Lysistrata set in the Old West and staged at a theatre restaurant) from Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens (defies description) or Romance! (best described as...