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Rachel Syme Goes Behind the Scenes of a Short-Lived Broadway Musical | The New Yorker

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At Joe Allen, a restaurant on Forty-sixth Street where denizens of the theatre world have been convening for nearly six decades, the walls are lined with posters of Broadway’s legendary duds. In the early days, for a show to make the display, it had to close in less than a week. Qualifying flops included such productions as “Drat! The Cat!,” a sex farce about a Victorian cat burglar (eight performances), and “Via Galactica,” a seventies rock opera about a trash collector who lives on an asteroid (seven performances). Joe Allen specializes in comfort food—burgers, banana cream pie—and there is something oddly comforting, too, about its morbid choice of décor. No single misfire stands alone; failure is its own kind of rite of passage, to be commemorated along with success. The first poster that the restaurant ever hung, in 1965, was for “Kelly,” about a man who jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge and survives. The show was such a fiasco that the writers sued the producers even before it premiè

Save this story Save this story At Joe Allen, a restaurant on Forty-sixth Street where denizens of the theatre world have been convening for nearly six decades, the walls are lined with posters of Broadway’s legendary duds. In the early days, for a show to make the display, it had to close in less than a week. Qualifying flops included such productions as “Drat! The Cat!,” a musical comedy about a Victorian cat burglar (eight performances), and “Via Galactica,” a seventies rock opera about a trash collector who lives on an asteroid (seven performances). Joe Allen specializes in comfort food—bu

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