"The 25 Worst Broadway Musicals of the Millennium"

by Adam Feldman and David Cote 

[Are you like me?  Do you indulge in a bit of Schadenfreude, just for fun now and then?

[Okay, I don’t really take pleasure in someone else’s bad luck.  But sometimes, when it’s anonymous—and brought on by a touch of arrogance or predictable stupidity, it can be a little fun to wallow.  If that’s you, then you’ll enjoy this article, a catalogue of flop Broadway musicals from between 2001 and 2021.  The list and the review excerpts are compiled by a couple of reviewers from Time Out New York. 

[The shows labeled the “worst Broadway musicals of the millennium” are all the product of some really bad thinking.  I managed to have stayed away from all of them because not one of them sounded like something I’d want to sit through.  For the most part, apparently, I wasn’t alone.  (The reviewers had to go, more’s the pity.)

[The article, which unfortunately lacks the past two years, appeared on Time Out New York’s website on 9 February 2022.  All excerpts from reviews are from TONY and many are online.  (Jason Zinoman, who reviewed the first two productions on the list; Adam Feldman; and David Cote, were or are staff reviewers for the weekly entertainment magazine.)]

Once you’ve seen these song-and-dance bombs, you can’t un-see them. Here are the worst Broadway musicals since 2000.

When it comes to Broadway musicals, we try to accentuate the positive. We cheer for breakthroughs such as Hamilton [Lin-Manuel Miranda; Richard Rodgers Theatre; 6 August 2015-Present; 2,989 performances (as of 21 April 2024); directed by Thomas Krail; choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler; 15 Tony nominations, 11 awards]. We get misty-eyed when the Tony Awards hand out prizes. We curate a list of the best Broadway shows to share our enthusiasms. But anyone who loves song-and-dance spectacles has a dark side: There’s a flop vulture in each of us, keeping track of the dumbest, tackiest and most misguided musicals we’ve ever seen. Hence this list, a chronological reckoning of the worst Broadway musicals since 2000—a mix of awkward sentimentality, crimes against literature, bottom-scraping jukebox shows and deeply misconceived film-to-musical adaptations. Together, they represent more than 50 hours of agony, boredom and embarrassment in the theater. Yet today, we present them and say: Enjoy!

[1] Thou Shalt Not

Director Susan Stroman was on fire after the runaway success of 2001’s The Producers, but she doused her momentum in shallow water later that year at the helm of Harry Connick Jr.’s musical tragedy, set in 1940s New Orleans.

[The Producers: Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan; St. James Theatre; 19 April 2001-22 April 2007; 2,502 performances; directed and choreographed by Stroman; 12 Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Direction of a Musical.]

Opening date: October 25, 2001 [closed: 6 January 2002]

Performances: 85

From Jason Zinoman’s review: ”Lincoln Center’s vulgar adaptation of Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin is a misguided laughingstock of the variety that only Broadway can produce. Thou Shalt Not is a story of murder, greed and sin—with a little tap dancing thrown in.”

[Record (from IBDB): Plymouth Theatre; book by David Thompson, music and lyrics by Harry Connick, Jr.; directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman; no awards, nominated for 2002 Tony for Best Original Musical Score.

[Thou Shalt Not must not be confused with Thérèse Raquin, a straight play based on the same 1868 novel by Émile Zola.  It played at Studio 54 from 29 October 2015 to 3 January 2016, running for 75 regular performances.  It was written by Helen Edmundson and directed by Evan Cabnet; Keira Knightley made her Broadway début in the title role.  The criticism was middling to poor, with a few cheers in the mix.  The production was nominated for a 2016 Tony for Best Scenic Design of a Play (for Beowulf Boritt), but didn’t win.]

[2] Dance of the Vampires 

Michael Crawford sucked hard as an aristocratic neck-biter pursued by a vampire hunter somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains. The bombastic, campy score was by Jim Steinman, including his hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Opening date: December 9, 2002 [closed: 25 January 2003]

Performances: 56

From Jason Zinoman’s review: ”Subtle, this ain’t. The overamped Vampires doesn’t just preach that bigger is better. Louder, brighter and hammier work too. Why have one dancing vampire, when you can crowd the stage with half a dozen Draculas kickin’ up their heels?” 

[Record: Minskoff Theatre; book by David Ives, Jim Steinman, and Michael Kunze; music and lyrics by Steinman; based on the 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers by Roman Polanski; directed by John Rando; choreographed by John Carrafa; no awards or nominations.]

[3] Urban Cowboy

A Texas honky-tonk with a mechanical bull (stay on it and win a cash prize) was the main setting for this country & western rom-com about a woman who has to choose between an ex-con and a hardworkin’ good ole boy.

Opening date: March 27, 2003 [closed: 18 May 2003]

Performances: 60

From David Cote’s review: ”When not relying on pop-country classics and bump ‘n’ grind line-dancing extravaganzas, the flimsy book veers between dumb jokes and pathetic stabs at character development. Woe betide anyone hankering for a well-crafted musical. You’d be looking for art in all the wrong places.” 

[Record: Broadhurst Theatre; book by Aaron Latham and Phillip Oesterman; based on the 1980 film directed by James Bridges; stage adaptation directed by Lonny Price; choreographed by Melinda Price; two Tony nominations, no awards.]

[4] Dracula[, the Musical]

Hoping to reproduce the success of his awful but long-running Jekyll & Hyde, composer Frank Wildhorn returned to Broadway with a synth-heavy, ultrabombastic musical fright fest that had critics running for rhetorical garlic.

[Jekyll & Hyde: Leslie Bricusse and Frank Wildhorn; Plymouth Theatre; 28 April 1997-7 January 2001; 1,543 performances; directed by Robin Phillips; choreographed by Joey Pizzi; four Tony nominations, no awards.]

[Dracula, the Musical should not be confused with the successful revival of the 1927 non-musical play, Dracula by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, that ran at the Martin Beck Theatre from 20 October 1977 to 6 January 1980 (925 performances).  That production was directed by Dennis Rosa with Frank Langella in the title role and set and costume designs by macabre cartoonist Edward Gorey.  The show won 1978 Tonys for Best Costume Design and Most Innovative Production of a Revival.]

Opening date: August 19, 2004 [closed: 2 January 2005]

Performances: 157

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”Dracula plays like the longest and drippiest Meat Loaf video [e]ver, a dunderheaded pseudoromance that travesties Bram Stoker’s novel. (A Dracula who emerges from his coffin to sing ‘It’s hard to make each moment count when you’re alone / Maybe that’s all I need to know’ is unlikely to strike fear into anyone except those with taste in lyrics.)” 

[Record: Belasco Theatre; book by Don Black and Christopher Hampton; music by Frank Wildhorn; lyrics by Black and Hampton; based on 1897 Bram Stoker story; directed by Des McAnuff; choreographed by Mindy Cooper; no awards or nominations.]

[5] Brooklyn

A cast of five wore garbage, and sang it, in this loud and bizarre musical, presented as a play-within-a-play by homeless musicians under a bridge. Somehow it all ended with a sing-off between a French convent girl and an evil Black diva at Madison Square Garden.

Opening date: October 21, 2004 [closed: 26 June 2005]

Performances: 284

From David Cote’s review: ”The latest example of urban blight is Brooklyn, by far the biggest eyesore, earsore and brainsore on the Great White Way. An infantile urban fable periodically pierced by American Idol-style bellowing, Brooklyn wallows in trash of every kind. What it deserves from any self-respecting inhabitant of the five boroughs is a loud Bronx cheer.” 

[Record: Plymouth/Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre; book, music, and lyrics by Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson; directed by Jeff Calhoun; no choreographer listed; no awards or nominations.]

[6] Good Vibrations

More than 30 Beach Boys songs were crammed into this story about a geeky high-school graduate and her three friends on a cross-country sojourn to California for surfing and romance.

Opening date: February 2, 2005 [closed: 24 April 2005]

Performances: 94

From David Cote’s review: ”It’s the kind of embarrassing fiasco that only a committee of gutless and tasteless Broadway producers could foist on the public. The deformed hate child [of] Mamma Mia! and Movin’ Out, it aspires to the ditsy hit-parade nostalgia of the former and the aerobic dance appeal of the latter.” 

[Record: Eugene O’Neill Theatre; book by Richard Dresser; music and lyrics by Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys; directed and choreographed by John Carrafa; no awards or nominations.]

[7] Lennon

Another jukebox-musical misfire, this one with songs by visionary ex-Beatle John Lennon. A diverse nine-member ensemble trudged its way through Lennon’s hits in an abstract, high-concept staging.

Opening date: August 14, 2005 [closed: 24 September 2005]

Performances: 49

From David Cote’s review: ”A ’70s-nostalgia wallow and peacenik hagiography implicitly pegged to the war in Iraq [2003-11]. Advance hype on this show was misleadingly dire. It’s not the car crash that flop vultures have hoped for, but that’s only because its engine never starts.” 

[Record: Broadhurst Theatre; book by Don Scardino; music and lyrics by John Lennon; directed by Scardino; choreographed by Joseph Malone; no awards or nominations.]

[8] In My Life

Joseph Brooks was best known for the treacly pop ballad “You Light Up My Life” [originally recorded by Kasey Cisyk for the soundtrack album to the 1977 film of the same title] when he wrote, directed and produced this gobsmacker about a young man with Tourette syndrome and a brain tumor. In the show’s takeaway number, a campy angel sang “There’s a little rumor / Someone’s got a tumor,” then danced with a skeleton.

Opening Date: October 20, 2005 [closed: 11 December 2005]

Performances: 61

From David Cote’s review: ”Delusions of grandeur clearly attended the clueless construction of this musical, in which people fall in love with undetectable chemistry, suffer without arousing pity and die with no other consequence than relief. Those who decry shows made by committee should be careful what they wish for: In My Life is the sound of one man flopping.” 

[Record: Music Box Theatre; book. music, and lyrics by Joseph Brooks; directed by Brooks; no choreographer listed; no awards or nomination.]

[9] Hot Feet

An African-American twist on Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “The Red Shoes” and Michael Powell’s 1948 movie, scored to pop hits by Earth, Wind & Fire. Maurice Hines choreographed and directed this flat-footed fable about a young dancer mixed up with a satanic impresario.

Opening date: April 30, 2006 [closed: 23 July 2006]

Performances: 97

From David Cote’s review: ”This overamped, overacted eyesore barely sustains interest beyond the morbid kind: What new terpsichorean travesty will they foist on us next? In seeking to force the Faustian moral into a modern-day African-American context, Hines displays either flagrant ignorance, cynicism—or both.” 

[Record: Hilton Theatre; book by Heru Ptah; music and lyrics by Maurice White; directed and choreographed by Maurice Hines; no awards or nominations.]

[10] Lestat

After the Dance of the Vampires and Dracula[, the Musical] fiascos, Broadway hardly needed another bloodsucker musical, but it got a third anyhow in this Anne Rice adaptation, with a score by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. This one put the nail in the coffin—for now, at least.

Opening date: April 25, 2006 [closed: 28 May 2006]

Performances: 39

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”Like any bogeyman in a B-grade fright flick, the vampire musical won’t stay dead. Just when it seemed safe to go to Broadway again, Lestat has swooped into the Palace. Is Elton John’s undead musical much better than its predecessors? The short answer is: no. The long answer is: no, no, no. Episodic and maudlin, the show is bound together by crimson kitsch.”

[Record: Palace Theatre; book by Linda Woolverton; music by Elton John; lyrics by Bernie Taupin; based on The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice; directed by Robert Jess Roth; no choreographer listed; two Tony nominations, no awards.]

[11] The Pirate Queen

The buccaneering hero of this leaky historical musical by Les Misérables creators Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg was a female raider [Grace O'Malley, ca. 1530-ca. 1603] who gives England’s Elizabeth I [reigned: 1558-1603] trouble on the high seas.

Opening date: April 5, 2007 [closed: 17 June 2007]

Performances: 85

From David Cote’s review: ”Even from the most crassly pandering point of view, The Pirate Queen is a total failure: not even good schlock. If only the creative team had the courage of its lack of conviction. It puts the aar back in aartless gaarbage.” 

[Record: Hilton Theatre; book by Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg, and Richard Maltby, Jr.; music by Schönberg; lyrics by Boublil, Maltby, and Morgan Llywelyn; based on Llywelyn's 1986 historical novel Grania: She King of the Irish Seas; directed by Frank Galati; choreographed by Carol Leavy Joyce; no Tony awards or nominations.]

[12] Baby It’s You!

Although this jukebox musical was built around the songs of the Shirelles (with the glaring exception of their biggest hit, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”), the African-American singers took a back seat to the story of their producer, a Jewish New Jersey housewife played by Beth Leavel.

Opening date: April 27, 2011 [closed: 4 September 2011]

Performances: 148

From David Cote’s review: ”Baby It’s You! touches on a few worthy topics—payola, interracial romance, Brill Building song-factory practices—and manages to drain each of tension and subtlety. The big-voiced, warmly rueful Leavel moves heaven and earth to make us root for plucky Florence. Whole seconds pass in which you forget how dumb and shoddy the show is.” 

[Record: Broadhurst Theatre; book by Floyd Mutrux and Colin Elliott; directed by Mutrux; choreographed by Birgitte Mutrux; one Tony nomination, no awards.]

[13] The People in the Picture

Donna Murphy played a Jewish bubbe regaling her granddaughter with tales of her friends in the Warsaw Ghetto. Who doesn’t love a tear-jerking musical about the Holocaust? As it turns out, a lot of people don’t.

Opening date: April 11, 2011 [closed: 19 June 2011]

Performances: 60

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”The People in the Picture renders its story the way fat is rendered in an old Jewish home: over low heat, with traditional tools, in the service of making schmaltz. Iris Rainer Dart’s sincere, well-meaning musical caters to a taste for sentiment spread thick. But crying at this show is like crying at sliced onions.” 

[Record: Studio 54; book by Iris Rainer Dart; music by Mike Stoller and Artie Butler; lyrics by Dart; directed by Leonard Foglia; no choreographer listed; one Tony nomination, no award.]

[14] Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (original version)

Julie Taymor could not get the Bono-and-the-Edge-scored comic-book musical off the ground. Six months of previews, onstage injuries, desperate spin and a $75 million-dollar un-recouped budget made it the flop to end all flops.

Opening date: June 14, 2011 [closed: 4 January 2014]

Performances: 1066

From David Cote’s review of version 1.0: ”Spider-Man is a crummy, pandering kids’ musical pretending to be a new form of entertainment—a ‘circus rock drama,’ as Taymor claims with Barnum-level swagger. The production is a deeply confused, ugly, ultimately boring example of artistic hubris enabled by financial excess.” 

[Record: Foxwoods Theatre; book by Julie Taymor, Glen Berger, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa; music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge (of U2); based on the Marvel Comics character Spider-Man, elements of the 2002 film Spider-Man, the 2004 film Spider-Man 2, and the Greek myth of Arachne; original director: Taymor (“creative consultant”/subsequent director: Philip Wiliam McKinley – see below); choreography by Daniel Ezralow; two Tony nominations, no awards.

[An explanation of why Cote writes about an “original version” and “version 1.0”: For those who weren’t around in 2010 and 2011, or weren’t paying attention to the Broadway Buzz at that time, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was arguably the most troubled production in Broadway history, possibly in all of theater history. 

[According to Wikipedia:

Several actors were injured performing stunts and the opening night was repeatedly delayed, causing some critics to review the “unfinished” production in protest [most on 7 February 2011]. Following negative reviews, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark suspended performances for a month to retool the show. Aguirre-Sacasa, a longtime Spider-Man comics writer, was brought in to revise the story and book. The director, Julie Taymor, . . . was replaced by the creative consultant Philip William McKinley. By the time Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark officially opened on June 14, 2011, it had set the record for the longest preview period in Broadway history [28 November 2010-14 June 2011], with 182 [preview] performances.

[(I have a post on ROT on my take on the press controversy regarding the reviews of Spider-Man: “Reviewing the Situation: Spider-Man & the Press,” 20 March 2011.)

[During the retooling of the production, when Aquirre-Sacasa came in to revise the script, Taymor left the show but retained her program credits.  McKinley was brought in to replace Taymor as de facto director, but was given the title “creative consultant” in press releases and the opening-night Playbill.

[After Spider-Man finally started previews on 28 November 2010, Cote wrote two reviews.  The second one came out on the TONY website (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark | Theater in New York (timeout.com)) on 15 June 2011, the day after the official press opening (as traditional reviews are usually published).

[Cote’s first notice was published on 11 February 2011, in the middle of the extended preview period.  This is the review he’s excerpted above (and it’s included online with the second one), slugged “original version” and “version 1.0” to distinguish this review from his final, more positive (marginally) notice of the re-jiggered production that finally opened on 14 June.

[Note that Spider-Man ran for 1066 regular performances but was still “a massive financial loss.”  The production had cost $75 million, the most expensive Broadway show ever.]

[15] Wonderland

Ever eager to put his stamp on public-domain material, Dracula tunesmith Frank Wildhorn dragged Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice down a dingy rabbit hole in this joylessly energetic blunder.

Opening date: April 17, 2011 [closed: May 2011]

Performances: 33

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”’Tis Wildhorn, and the hapless cast / Does direly gambol on the stage. / All flimsy is the plot half-assed, / Not right for any age. / Beware of Wonderland, I warn! / The jokes that cloy, the scenes that flop! / Beware the humdrum words and scorn / The spurious, bland rock-pop!” 

[Record: Marquis Theatre; book by Gregory Boyd and Jack Murphy; music by Frank Wildhorn; lyrics by Murphy; contemporary version of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” books; directed by Boyd; choreographed by Margueritte Derricks, no awards or nominations.]

[16] On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

The 1965 version of this musical was a famous mess about extrasensory perception, past lives and a kooky gal with a magical green thumb. The 2011 revisal, rewritten extensively enough to be considered a new show with an old score, made it even murkier.

[On a Clear Day (original version): Mark Hellinger Theatre; 17 October 1965-11 June 1966 (280 regular performances); directed by Robert Lewis; choreographed by Herbert Ross; 3 Tony nominations, no awards.]

Opening date: December 11, 2011 [closed: 29 January 2012]

Performances: 57

From David Cote’s review: “It was broke, but they sure ain’t fixed it. The famously flawed 1965 Burton Lane-Alan Jay Lerner romantic comedy has been reincarnated into a clunky bore that switches time periods and gender, inserts a gay subplot and turns its putative hero into a creepy, manipulative stalker.”

[Record: St. James Theatre; reconceived by Michael Mayer; new book (2011) by Peter Parnell; music (1965) by Alan Jay Lerner; lyrics (1965) by Burton Lane; based on original book (1965) by Lerner; directed by Mayer; choreographed by JoAnn M. Hunter; one Tony nomination, no award.]

[17] Scandalous

Morning talk-show host Kathie Lee Gifford penned the book, lyrics and some music for this manic, grating paean to the life and work of controversial Hollywood spiritual leader Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944).

Opening date: November 15, 2012 [closed: 9 December 2012]

Performances: 29

From David Cote’s review: ”It’s a CliffsNotes take on the 20th-century evangelist, a trinity of camp, kitsch and middlebrow morality that, through uncritical worship, makes its hero the least interesting person onstage—despite throat-shredding vocal pyrotechnics. I have seen worse shows, but few as wild-eyed and zealously wrongheaded.” 

[Record: Neil Simon Theatre; book and lyrics by Kathie Lee Gifford; music by David Pomeranz and David Friedman; directed by David Armstrong; choreographed by Lorin Latarro; one Tony nomination, no award.]

[18] Soul Doctor

Shlomo Carlebach [1925-94] was a charismatic Hasid who used folky, catchy tunes to spread a hippie-friendly message of spirituality in the 1960s and beyond. This short-lived tuner didn’t win him any converts.

Opening date: August 15, 2013 [closed: 13 October 2013]

Performances: 66

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”Gevalt! The best that can be said about this strange Broadway musical, based on the life and music of ‘singing rabbi’ Shlomo Carlebach, is that it isn’t as bad as it sounds. But the show digs shallowly into its central character, and often rings false. Reverent to a fault, Soul Doctor bleaches a story that cries out for tie-dye.”

[Record: Circle in the Square Theatre; book by Daniel S. Wise; music by Shlomo Carlebach; lyrics by David Schechter; directed by Wise; choreographed by Benoit-Swan Pouffer; no awards or nominations.]

[19] Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak’s novel of life before and after the 1917 Russian Revolution was the fodder for this lumbering dud. An idealistic physician survives World War I, sadistic Soviets and multiple hardships, all while pursuing the woman he loves.

Opening date: April 21, 2015 [closed: 10 May 2015]

Performances: 23

From David Cote’s review: ”No amount of Lucy Simon’s syrupy, portentous music—swamping Michael Korie and Amy Powers’s workmanlike lyrics—can make us care for the synthetic, drably colored pageant. Des McAnuff’s staging looks expensive but ugly, with cheesy video close‑ups of actors, giant Soviet propaganda posters, eruptions of fire and the occasional explosion or gunshot to wake us up. To Siberia with it.” 

[Record: Broadway Theatre; book by Michael Weller; music by Lucy Simon; lyrics by Michael Korie and Amy Powers; based on the 1957 novel by Boris Pasternak; directed by Des McAnuff; choreographed by Kelly Devine; no nominations or awards.]

[20] Amazing Grace

First-time composer-lyricist and book writer Christopher Smith took inspiration from the life and religious conversion of John Newton [1725-1807], a British slave trader who later in life wrote lyrics for the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

Opening date: July 16, 2015 [closed: 25 October 2015]

Performances: 116

From David Cote’s review: ”A clunky period piece broken up by bombastic, generic anthems. Personally, I expect poetic license in the theater, but it should serve a strong artistic or political vision. Amazing Grace has neither. It comes out strongly against slavery; well done. But it mainly proves that folks are willing to burn piles of money trying to resurrect the 1980s-style megamusical.”

[Record: Nederlander Theatre; book by Christopher Smith and Arthur Giron; music and lyrics by Smith; directed by Gabriel Barre; choreographed by Christopher Gattelli; no nominations or awards.]

[21] Home for the Holidays

This tacky pop-up Broadway concert, the yuletide equivalent of a Halloween costume store, featured a comically motley cast: three winners of televised vocal contests, a former star of The Bachelorette, a married a cappella duo and veteran character actor Danny Aiello.

Opening date: November 21, 2017 [closed: 30 December 2017]

Performances: 47

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”Home for the Holidays is unlikely to remind you much of home, unless you were raised in a department-store elevator.”

[Record: August Wilson Theatre; no book; songs are traditional; “creative director”: Jonathan Tessero, no awards or nomonations.]

[22] Gettin’ the Band Back Together

A 40-year-old stockbroker in New Jersey must reassemble his high-school rock combo to save his mother from eviction in this schlocky and formulaic comedy by Ken Davenport and Mark Allen.

Opening date: August 13, 2018 [closed: 16 September 2018]

Performances: 40

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”Gettin’ the Band Back Together aspires to a knowing attitude toward its own silliness, but it’s not sharp enough to pull off the gambit; you can’t tell if it’s winking or just has something weird in its eye. Whatever quotation marks this musical might want to put around ‘stupid’ have melted away, leaving only desperate salesmanship.”

[Record: Belasco Theatre; book by Ken Davenport and The Grundleshotz (a collective of performers and writers); music and lyrics by Mark Allen; directed by John Rando; choreographed by Chris Bailey; no awards or nominations.]

[23] Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

An impoverished child gets the chance to take candy from a stranger in this shapeless musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s story.

Opening date: October 5, 2018 [closed: 14 January 2018]

Performances: 305

From David Cote’s review: ”This dull, clunky adaptation of the book and movie with none of the wit of the former nor the dreamy wonder of the latter. Adults are bound to conclude that Charlie is like what happens with an Everlasting Gobstopper: lots of sucking.”

[Record: Lunt-Fontanne Theatre; book by David Craig; music by Marc Shaiman; lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Wittman; based on the 1964 novel by Roald Dahl with songs by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley from the 1971 film Willy Wonka &  the Chocolate Factory; directed by Jack O’Brien; choreographed by Joshua Bergasse; no Tony nominations or awards.]

[24] King Kong

Broadway went apeshit in a musical a[d]aptation of the ape-meets-girl classic that featured an extremely impressive 20-foot, 2,000-pound animatronic puppet. But this very special effect was caged in a vehicle that was mostly pretty awful.

Opening date: November 8, 2018 [closed: 18 August 2019]

Performances: 322

From Adam Feldman’s review: ”The truly frustrating thing about King Kong is the waste of it all. Why did this story, whose central figure necessarily cannot sing, need to be a musical at all, much less one that suggests a late-run Simpsons parody?”

[Record: Broadway Theatre; book by Jack Thorne; music by Marius de Vries with songs by Eddie Perfect; based on the classic 1933 film; directed and choreographed by Drew McOnie; Special Tony Award for Puppet Design, plus four more nominations.]

[25] Diana[, T]he Musical

Book writer Joe DiPietro and composer David Bryan offered a campy, dishy pop-rock clip job of tabloid moments from the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a car accident in 1997.

Opening date: November 17, 2021 [closed: 19 December 2021]

Performances: 34

From Adam Feldman’s review: “The gobsmacking unseriousness that characterizes Diana’s approach to the late princess is also what makes it bearable to watch in a way that a more earnest version would probably never have been. For collectors of flop shows, Diana is a keeper: It goes for broke, and achieves it.”   

[Record: Longacre Theatre; book by Joe DiPietro; music by David Bryan; lyrics by Bryan and DiPietro; directed by Christopher Ashley; choreographed by Kelly Devine; one Tony nomination, no awards.

[The Broadway production of Diana, The Musical was recorded in the summer of 2020. This video, directed by Ashley, was released on Netflix on 1 October 2021. The recording received nine nominations at the 42nd Golden Raspberry Awards, winning for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay, among other categories.]

Reviewing the Beatles

by Kirk Woodward

[My friend and a longtime contributor to Rick On Theater, Kirk Woodward, is an avid Beatles fan—right from their very start in this country.  He also happens to be musically educated, so he’s written for this blog many times on both music and the Fab Four,

[Furthermore, Kirk’s knowledgeable about the art of review-writing—as he demonstrated with his book The Art of Writing Reviews (Merry Press, 2009; http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272)--so this time around he’s applied those three attributes (believe me, he has more, as frequent readers of ROT will know) to comment on the press coverage of the Beatles during the years they were together.

[Kirk is focusing on the coverage in the New York Times—I’ll let him tell you why—but not only is his analysis valid for other outlets, but it can be applied to reviews in other fields: theater, books, and art, among others.]

I have in front of me a collection of articles about the Beatles printed in The New York Times from 1963 through 2013. I have written extensively about the Beatles in this blog; their cultural influence is so vast that it doesn’t seem out of place to discuss them in a context primarily devoted to theater.

[The past Beatles posts contributed to Rick On Theater by Kirk Woodward include: “The Beatles and Me,” 7 October 2010; “The Beatles Box,” 30 September 2012; “The Beatles Diary” by Kirk Woodward & Pat Woodward, 8 January 2013; “The Beatles’ Influence,” 13 July 2015; “Now, Live, the Non-Beatles,” 27 September 2016; “Bob and Ringo,” 1 December 2017; and “Help!,” 17 September 2020.]

Besides, this time I will be discussing, not so much the Beatles themselves, as how they were covered in one newspaper of reputation and impact, up to the end of their time together as a group (roughly, late 1969). I could have chosen any number of other approaches; there are hundreds of books about the Beatles written from every possible angle, from the foolish to the penetrating.

The Times, of course, began covering the Beatles as a news event – huge crowds, screaming fans – at a time when reviewing popular music was not a primary focus of journalism. The paper did its best, I’d say, by printing articles written by the outstanding rock reviewers of the day. As we will see, its coverage of the Beatles’ music improved steadily.  As we will also see, where critical opinions are concerned, anything goes!

We have the advantage, as the writers of many of the Times pieces did not at the time, of knowing how the Beatles “turned out.” Successfully predicting the future is difficult; second-guessing is easy, and probably unfair. However, if there are agreed-on standards for reviewing, it is fair to apply them and see how well they were met. Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) proposed such standards and they have held up well. A reviewer, Goethe suggests, should ask:

What is the artist trying to do?
How well do they do it?
Is it worth doing?  

Based on observation I would say that reviewers who habitually ask and answer these questions are few and far between, and that many if not most reviewers go immediately to the last question, with some of the second perhaps thrown in for good measure.

In any case, these questions will be invaluable as we look at the Times’ coverage of the Beatles. Many writers contributed to that coverage, of course, and the results vary.

The first article, from 1 December 1963 by Frederick Lewis for The New York Times Magazine, is light on examination of the Beatles’ music. To be fair, there was not at that point a great deal to examine. Lewis provides a non-hysterical examination of the Beatles’ sociological and psychological significance:

They are working-class, and their roots and attitudes are firmly of the North of England. Because of their success they can act as spokesmen for the new, noisy, anti-Establishment generation which is becoming a force in British life. In their uncompromising Northernness, they are linked with actors like Albert Finney and with novelists like Alan Stilltoe [1928-2010, novelist and author of the short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”] and John Braine [1922-1986, novelist noted for the book Room at the Top].

On 10 February 1964, the day after the first appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, Jack Gould (1914-1993, television reporter for the Times) was dismissive and patronizing, talking about “the cyclical turnover in teenage trauma.” He said basically nothing about their music. Surprisingly, Theodore Strongin (1918-1998), a composer who sometimes wrote for the Times, made an effort to come to terms with the Beatles musically, if bafflingly:

Their harmony is unmistakeably diatonic. A learned British colleague, writing on his home ground, has described it as pandiatonic, but I disagree. [With more music to examine, he probably would have actually agreed, at least to some extent. “Pandiatonic” basically means the use of notes that the average ear would not expect.]

The Beatles have a tendency to build phrases around unresolved leading tones. This precipitates the ear into a false modal frame that temporarily turns the fifth of the frame into the tonic, momentarily suggesting the Mixolydian mode. But everything always ends as plain diatonic all the same.

At least he is trying to engage with the music; good luck reaching the readership. He continues:

The Beatles’s vocal quality can be described as vocally incoherent, with the minimal communication necessary to communicate the schematic texts.

Here we see in embryo an approach frequently encountered in reviews of the Beatles: the dismissal of rock as an inferior form, without principles or values of its own. (We will encounter the opposite of this approach later.)

The video of the first Ed Sullivan appearance is available on YouTube; the words can be understood, and the Beatles are “communicating” as rock musicians. That was what they intended to do, and that was what they did, with obvious success. They were unquestionably communicating effectively within their chosen field.

It is reasonable to note that, at this early point in the Beatles’ career, screaming audiences were the first thing many people noticed, because, first, you couldn’t miss them, and, second, they made it difficult at best to hear the performances of the songs, or to think about anything else. So most early articles review the audiences more than they do the Beatles. That is not our approach here, and, of course, that situation would change.

I do feel it’s worthwhile to point out that some people in early 1964 already had a high opinion of the Beatles’ music – me, for one, because very early I heard “From Me to You” on the radio (it originally got brief airplay in the United States in 1963) and loved its brightness and its harmonies. Not surprised when they “hit it big,” I was listening for more good music, and got it. Similarly, I remember in college asking my friend John Burgard, a musician and still a figure in the Louisville, Kentucky, blues scene, if he had been surprised by the Beatles’ success. “No,” he said, “I had listened to the records.”

Robert Shelton (1926-1995), in an article published 11 August 1965 in anticipation of the Beatles’ famous appearance at Shea Stadium, accurately summarized their earliest music:

The music of the Beatles is a form of American music that ricocheted to Europe, became infused with the group’s personality and has since bounced back here. Mostly, the “Liverpool Sound” is a buoyant, infectiously rhythmic series of cadences, with some unsettlingly exciting harmonies (in open fourths and fifths), a bedrock blues beat and an aura of youth, channeled sexuality and exuberance. Often there is a wistful, plaintive quality to their slower ballads.

The Beatles were influenced while working in the Cavern in Liverpool, directly or through recordings brought by American seamen from the Gulf Coast, with American rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, or rockabilly interpreters, such as Mr. Presley, Little Richard, the Everlys or Buddy Holly and the Crickets. From this, with a dash of the British folk-jazz called “skiffle,” the Beatles’ style emerged.

There is more that Shelton could have said – by this point the Beatles had issued several albums, including Help! (although Shelton may not have heard it in its remarkable British form), and Rubber Soul was just ahead.

Dan Sullivan (b. 1935) in an article in the Times on 3 March 1967 had enough information to say:

The funny thing about teenage idols is that some of them turn out to be artists. Frank Sinatra illustrated the process years ago. Now we have The Beatles. . . . Beatlemania and the editorials about it quickly grew tiresome, but not the Beatles themselves. Entirely apart from their authentic personal charm, they proved to be far more original musicians than they had seemed at first. . . . The Buddy Holly yelps and Elvis Presley growls gradually fall away, and are replaced by odd intervals, antique harmonies, raga-like sequences and rhythmic devices new to pop music. . . . [Paul McCartney’s] casual way with the traditional harmonic circle-of-fifths has stretched the public’s ear considerably – as has his decision . . . not to limit himself to conventional four- or eight-bar melodic units.

The next major evaluation of Beatles music in the Times came with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), memorably reviewed for the paper by Richard Goldstein (b. 1942) on 18 June 1967.

Goldstein’s review, we may confidently say, goes against the flow of opinion about the album, which he describes at different points as “busy, hip and overcluttered”:

The obsession with production, coupled with a surprising shoddiness in composition, pervades the entire album. There is nothing beautiful about “Sergeant Pepper.” Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about [a reference to the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever”]. The Lennon raunchiness has become mere caprice . . . . Paul McCartney’s soaring Pop magnificats have become merely politely profound. . . . With one important exception, “Sergeant Pepper” is precious but devoid of gems.

(The exception Goldstein describes is the monumental track “A Day in the Life.”) Goldstein’s review has been the subject of astonishment since its publication; the reputation of the review has hounded him through the years. Several things are going on here.

First of all, every reviewer’s nightmare, I should think, is to pan an art work that turns out to be a classic. In the field of music, Nicholas Slonimsky (1894-1995), a conductor and composer, has compiled a Lexicon of Musical Invective (1953) which Wikipedia correctly describes as “a collection of hilariously scathing, insulting, vituperative, and enraged contemporary critiques of musical greats in their time,” including Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Puccini, and many, many others. Goldstein’s review belongs in such a collection (along with at least one other review to be discussed below).

Sometimes reviewers simply have bad days. Anthony Lane, the movie reviewer for The New Yorker, has described how he watched much of a film disapproving of its shadowy cinematography before realizing that he had his sunglasses on. Similarly, Richard Goldstein, although he does not apologize for his review, has confirmed to The Washington Post (11 May 2017) that he listened to Sgt. Pepper on a broken stereo record player, so the sound he heard was incomplete!

More importantly, however, Goldstein’s review illustrates a condition common in reviewers: they criticize a work, not beginning with its artist’s intentions, but with their own opinions about what such a work ought to be. In Goldstein’s case, he clearly states what he wanted to hear:

The best Beatle melodies are simple if original progressions braced with pungent lyrics. Even their most radical compositions retain a sense of unity.

That is to say, the Beatles should stick to the straightforward rock ’n’ roll that established their early reputation. Instead,

for the first time the Beatles have given us an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent.

The notion that an album is “fraudulent” occurs often in music reviews – other terms are “phony,” “not genuine,” and so on. This kind of attack has always mystified me. What does it mean? If it refers to insincerity on the part of the artist, how does one know that, and even if the artist is trying to produce deceptive work (I suppose that happens, but how often?), the resulting object is not honest or dishonest – it just is. (Pablo Picasso is supposed once to have said, “I can paint a fake Picasso as well as anybody.”)

More importantly, though, Goldstein actually senses what the Beatles intended to do – he just doesn’t like it. They intended – I believe, and many others have said – to create a “soundscape,” a set of aural images of unique beauty, and they succeeded.

Rock was their heritage, songs were their material, but their aim went beyond a collection of “good songs,” toward a new experience of sound. Goldstein senses this – but it doesn’t fit his idea of what they should be doing, so his review is off kilter from the start. Had he listened to Goethe, he likely would not have made this mistake.

Although Paul McCartney, according to reports, has held the review against Goldstein ever since, the Times did not. On 31 December 1967 Goldstein doubled down on his criticism in a review of the Magical Mystery Tour album which is even more an attack on what the Beatles were becoming:

The Beat is no longer implicit to the Beatles. In its place, they have created a collage of sound-images masquerading as Brechtian vaudeville. Sometimes this free inquiry into the nature of pop art stuns with a resonant power; at other times it seems capricious and gimmick-ridden. But rarely does it rock. . . . All these touches exemplify an approach to song that is closer to programmatic music than it is to rock. . . . Scratch the surface of “Magical Mystery Tour” and it bleeds like show music . . . . This electronic posturing is what I found fraudulent in “Sergeant Pepper,” and it is even more apparent here. . . . Does it sound like heresy to say that the Beatles write material which is literate, courageous, genuine, but spotty? It shouldn’t. They are inspired posers, but we must keep our heads on their music, not their incarnations. In that critical distance lies the deepest sort of respect.

One would guess Goldstein had received a certain amount of pushback from his review of Sgt. Pepper. One notices his insistence that the Beatles should be creating more “rock”; anything else is “electronic posturing,” “fraudulent” (there is that word again), created by “posers.” Again, he understands what the Beatles are trying to achieve – a “free inquiry into the nature of pop art.” He simply knows better than they what they ought to be doing.

Imagine his relief when he heard the album The Beatles (the “White Album”), which he reviewed on 8 December 1968. One would assume that a review that ended with the following sentence was a positive review:

This album is so vast in its scope, so intimate in its detail, and so skillful in its approach, that even the flaws add to its flavor.

In fact the opening paragraphs of the review drip with scorn:

The Beatles . . . epitomize the pretenses of their culture. For, more than anyone in the pop hegemony, the Beatles involve themselves in the times. Unlike Dylan, who wanders like a pilgrim across the fiery plains of his own imagination, the Beatles are inspired groovers, equally at home in the haute monde (which cherishes them as clever rakes) and the underground (where they are loved as magic rebels).

Goldstein essentially accuses the Beatles of pandering to their times, a conclusion undercut by the fact that their music has vitality more than half a century after it was first heard. Oddly, he also feels that the Beatles are trying to regain their own past:

What the Beatles are really attempting to revive here is the spontaneous vitality of their earliest songs. They mean to project a sense of the immediate, the makeshift and the incomplete – all missing from their recent work.

I simply do not believe that an open-minded listener will take away from the album a sense of “the makeshift and the incomplete.” But once again, Goldstein senses the real thrust of the Beatles’ intention with the album, at least as I understand it:

Even more effective is the album’s burlesque of musical forms. In this respect, “The Beatles” is almost a mock-history of pop.”

“Mock” does not strike me as the correct word, but I definitely hear the album as a tribute to what music can do, and a successful one. (It’s my favorite of any album, Beatles or otherwise.) So when Goldstein says he hopes that “Yer Blues” is meant as “a parody of white blues,” I want to say, “Yes, of course it is, as you’d know if you’d calm down and listen to what the Beatles are actually doing.”

A minor detail is that Goldstein exercises his reviewers’ right to contradict himself. Writing about The Beatles he speaks of “the meticulous structure of ‘Sergeant Pepper.’” Here is what he wrote of that structure in his review of Sgt. Pepper: “There is no apparent thematic development in the placing of cuts, except for the effective juxtaposition of opposing musical styles. At best, the songs are only vaguely related.” So much for “meticulous structure!”

“This time, the Beatles have dared to be restrained,” Goldstein writes, a conclusion that seems incomprehensible to me if he listened to the album at all, as he obviously did – demonstrating again the power of the preconceived opinion.

“Restrained,” moreover, is hardly the word for the next major review of Beatle music in the Times – a cautionary tale of a review written by Nik Cohn (b. 1946) and published 5 October 1969 about the Beatles album Abbey Road. If a review is in part a consumer report, would you buy this album?

On “Abbey Road” the words are limp-wristed, pompous and fake. Clearly, the Beatles have now heard so many tales of their own genius that they’ve come to believe them, and everything here is Instant Art. Give me just five minutes in the privacy of your own home and I can make you a super-bard.

I am uncertain what he feels makes a lyric either limp-wristed or a fake.

Cohn then quotes a lyric from the album, about which I would like to say, as I have before, that quoting words from songs to prove their worthlessness is worthless, because a song lyric is only a part of a whole. Cohn should know better – he wrote a book called Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (1969), a quotation from a song recorded by Little Richard (Richard Penniman, 1932-2020), a nonsense lyric and a great and memorable one.

Cohn admires the medley that concludes the second side of the album, although even that admiration is mixed:

Apart from [a couple of short sections], it’s all pretty average stuff. Most of the melody lines have been used elsewhere, and some of the lyrics are quite painful. . . . Most of the lines here are steals, partly pinched from other people and partly from other Beatle albums.

And, he continues,

The rest of this album is an unmitigated disaster. . . . The badness ranges from mere gentle tedium to cringing embarrassment. The blues, for instance, is horribly out of tune, and Ringo’s ditty is purest Mickey Mouse.

Finally we get to the foundation of the review, and, as with Richard Goldstein, it’s a notion of “real” rock as a sort of primitive musical Garden of Eden. Cohn is discussing the song “Oh! Darling”:

Slow 1950’s rock was something very formal, a ritual as classic and changeless as bullfighting, in which each embellishment and each progression had its own exact function. On “Oh! Darling,” Lennon flounders in an orgy of gulps, howls and retches, flung together at random, and the whole point is lost.

This kind of overkill, in fact, has become very much a Beatles trademark. It ruined their last double-album, and it ruins two-thirds of “Abbey Road.” The great strength of the medley is that it doesn’t overkill – no repetitions, no heavy breathing. It gets back toward the kind of ease and style that the Beatles had five years ago.

One can argue with this screed on factual grounds – the long medley does include repetitions, and, embarrassingly, John Lennon doesn’t sing “Oh! Darling,” Paul McCartney does, as even a casual listener, much less an important rock reviewer, ought to know.

The more important point is that Cohn’s primary interest is in his picture of what he thinks the album ought to be, rather than in what it is. He seals this point with another illustration, this one from a song that actually is sung by John Lennon:

“Come Together” is a slowed-down reworking of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” and is intriguing only as a sign of just how low Lennon can sink these days. “You Can’t Catch Me” is a very great song, after all, and lumbering it with the kind of “Look Ma, I’m Jesus” lyrics that Lennon unloads here is not a crime that I’d like to have on my conscience.

It’s hard to decide which claim is more absurd – that Lennon’s song is Berry’s slowed down (it quotes, more or less, about eight words from the second verse of Berry’s song, and shares a two chord progression typical of the blues), or that Chuck Berry’s song is so great that it should represent the farthest advance of songwriting.

The New York Times is a great newspaper, and Richard Goldstein and Nik Cohn have both made significant contributions to the reviewing and criticism of music. The reviews discussed here did no great harm to the Beatles – Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road are widely considered masterpieces, are among fifteen Beatle recordings in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and have sold millions of copies. The reviews didn’t help Goldstein and Cohn, but both have nevertheless had long and productive careers.

And reviewing is a difficult and often arduous job. The pitfalls are many, some of which have been illustrated here:

Ignoring, dismissing, or minimizing the intention(s) behind the work.
Upholding standards that may not be appropriate to new work.
Factual errors.

It has been suggested more than once that reviewers ought to stick to description, and entirely avoid evaluation – in effect, to be reporters in the strictest sense of the word. This advice seems likely to be taken only by reviewers with little to offer. The greater their ability, the more likely they are to make a review a personal matter. In any case, a little humility and a little curiosity will help, and perhaps an internal conversation with Goethe.

[I don’t do footnotes on ROT, but occasionally I feel that a post should have a list of the sources at least of the quotations and other references.  Kirk’s “Reviewing the Beatles” fits that bill, I think, so I’m appending below a list Kirk assembled of the reviews from the New York Times he quoted and a couple of other sources of statements he made in his article. 

Cohn, Nik. “The Beatles: For 15 Minutes, Tremendous.” New York Times 5 October 1969: 13.

Edgers, Geoff. “Getting better all the time.” Washington Post 14 May 2017: E 1, 16. [On-line edition: “Meet the critic who panned ‘Sgt. Pepper’ then discovered his speaker was busted. He’s still not sorry,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/meet-the-critic-who-panned-sgt-peppers-then-discovered-his-speaker-was-busted-hes-still-not-sorry/2017/05/11/aa0058b4-2f44-11e7-9dec-764dc781686f_story.html, 11 May 2017.]

Goldstein, Richard. “Are They Waning?” New York Times 28 August 1967: D 14.

Goldstein, Richard. “The Beatles: Inspired Groovers.” New York Times 8 December 1968: 33.

Goldstein, Richard. “We Still Need the Beatles, but . . .” New York Times 18 June 1967: D 24.

Gould, Jack. “TV: The Beatles and Their Audience.”  New York Times 10 February 1964: 53.

Lane, Anthony. “Introduction.” Nobody’s Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker (Vintage, 9 September 2003), xx.

Lewis, Frederick. “Britons Succumb to ‘Beatlemania.’” The New York Times Magazine 1 December 1963: 124-26.

Shelton, Robert. “The Beatles Will Make the Scene Here Again, but the Scene Has Changed.” New York Times 11 August 1965: 40.

Strongin, Theodore. “TV: The Beatles and Their Audience.”  New York Times 10 February 196: 53.

Sullivan, Dan. “Beatles: More Than a Mania.” New York Times 5 March 1967: D 33.

[Geoff Edgers’s Washington Post article in which Richard Goldstein admitted he listened to Sgt. Pepper on a damaged stereo is on line, as are the New York Times reviews.  (Both papers have been digitized so there are databases which also have the .pdf versions of those articles as well, if you have access to one.)

[Readers should note that in articles dating from before the start of online publication (1996 for the Times), the digitization process sometimes introduces transcription errors or other problems into the online text that effects readability and accuracy. 

[Anthony Lane’s book, the source of the anecdote about his wearing sunglasses when he watched Contact, the movie he was reviewing for the New Yorker, is not online in its entirety.  Google Books offers a preview that includes most of the introduction, where Lane tells the story, and it’s quoted on several Internet websites.  One such site is http://richardgilbert.me/noted-anthony-lane/. 

[(For the curious, most of Lane’s 21 July 1997 review of Contact is also in the Google Books preview of Nobody’s Perfect [pp. 194-97] as well.  The sunglasses incident isn’t mentioned.)]