Flop! Hit Songs from Musical Misfires – Live at Zédel

Flop! Hit Songs from Musical Misfires at Crazy Coqs, Live at Zédel, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Never have I been treated to so many song gems from often obscure shows than during this show at the legendary Zédel which I had missed so much during my 18-month absence from England due to Covid-19.

Flop! Hit Songs from Musical Misfires is inspired by a weekly radio show for musical theatre lovers which celebrates Broadway and West End flop musicals. What began as a 10-minute segment on The Passion Project with Kate McKeown in May became a 30-minute show by July. Then, Flop! aired as a full-length hour-long radio show, streaming live weekly on Quarantine FM. Now, for our greatest pleasure, Michael Robert-Lowe and Becca Barrett have created a fully-fledged cabaret show, celebrating the greatest songs from these forgotten shows.

At beginning of the evening, the audience was asked: What is a flop and why did it happen? Is it a show that didn’t recuperate its investment? But history has shown that 80% of musicals don’t recoup their investment. In the case of legendary flops, from which the songs of this show are from, the case is more often that the book is not up to, or in tune with, the music. The best example is Jerry Herman’s Mack and Mabel (1974) which has an upbeat and tuneful score juxtaposed with a dark, depressing book about two people unable to express their love for each other.

Robert-Lowe’s rendition from Mack and Mabel was clearly one of the highlights of the evening, particularly due to the virtuoso piano-playing of David George Harrington, the evening’s brilliant musical director.

Kicking off the evening with a bang was Barrett’s emotional performance of ‘Meadowlark’ from Stephen Schwartz and Joseph Stein’s The Baker’s Wife (1981), perhaps the ultimate cabaret and audition song coming from one of the most dismal flops in musical theatre history.

Elsewhere, Joe Thompson-Oubari gave new life to ‘Fight the Fight’ from Tim Rice, Stuart Brayson and Bill Oakes’ musical From Here to Eternity (2013), in which he was an original cast member.

The vivacious Vivien Care, who stepped in as a last minute replacement, then followed with a very Cole Porter-esque song by Michel Legrand from the ill-fated Marguerite (2008), whose lyricist Alain Boublil (Les Mis) is still aiming to cook up a French production. Cone went on to a beautiful Lloyd Webber ballad from the critically-acclaimed but shortlived (because of its edgy subject matter) The Beautiful Game (2000).

Paralleling Mack and Mabel in the silent move era, Philip Griffiths then delivered a moving version of the soft ballad ‘The Moment I Close My Eyes’ from David Heneker and Warner Brown’s The Biograph Girl (1980), in which he too was an original cast member.

Griffiths also delivered a spectacular ‘Miracle’ from King, the Martin Luther King Jr. musical biopic recently staged as a concert in London. Thompson-Oubari then resurrected a song from the musical version of Bend It Like Beckham (2015), which unfortunately barely lasted a year in the West End at the Phoenix Theatre.

The host of the evening then continued with a couple of songs Spring Awakening (2006), which, although a huge hit on Broadway, was a huge flop in the West End after it transferred for a run at the Lyric Hammersmith. Barrett also performed ‘A Whale of a Tale’ form Moby Dick, which came and went at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1990 after just four months.

Two other notable moments of the evening were ‘Half a Moment’ from By Jeeves (1975), one of the first Lloyd Webber musicals which never quite made it and, as an encore, ‘If Mountains were Easy to Climb’, a duet for Viv and Becca from another movie adaptation, Mrs Henderson Presents (2015), which deserved a better fate in the West End after its successful run in Bath.

I don’t remember if it was Harold Prince or Steven Sondheim who said: “musicals are never made, they are always remade.” Long after the curtain came down on these ‘flops’, many great songs have managed to live on, be it on the cabaret stage or via seasons like Encores! in New York (the latter managed just before the pandemic to bring, at last, a perfectly fixed Mack and Mabel to life).

Patrick Honoré