Schadenfreude: Ken Mandelbaum's Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops (1991)

First, I imagine you're familiar with schadenfreude, the pleasure you get by contemplating someone else's misfortune (or as Homer Simpson puts it, "It's funny 'cause I don't know him."). If you're not, there's a whole song about it in Avenue Q, the Broadway Musical that unexpectedly won the Tony Award over Wicked.

Some of my happiest schadenfreude-ish moments have been spent reading Ken Mandelbaum's delightful tome detailing disasters from the past umpteen years' worth of Broadway seasons. (And devotees are desperate for a sequel!). It's the rare non-fiction work that I've happily returned to time and time again, as (a) it's hilarious, and (b) eventually one forgets exactly what went horribly wrong with Grind, or Juno, so it's a bit like reading it again for the first time.

Mandelbaum has devised different categories of flops. Some fail and are terrible and deserved it, some fail but are wonderful and it shouldn't have happened but it did. Some were close, but no cigar. He essentially creates a useful Taxonomy of Failure. But regardless of the category, Mandelbaum's deft writerly touch makes this thrilling reading throughout.

Because most shows fail (I think), at least financially—it's easy enough to run for more than a year and still not recoup your costs—Mandelbaum is looking at short-run shows, the blink-and-you-missed it types. I've been to a few of those. In 2003 I saw Lestat, which I'll e̶v̶i̶s̶c̶e̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ discuss rationally in a future post. In 2008 I saw part of Glory Days (seizing my chance, I escaped when the cast turned their backs to the audience in unison and walked up some set steps), henceforth referred to as "Glory Day" because it closed after opening night. I've seen Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, I've seen The Times They Are a-Changin', and I can assure you it's much more fun to read about such shows (especially from the pen of Mandelbaum) than to attend them.

Ken Mandelbaum is a born-and-raised New Yorker (from Brooklyn), who trained as an actor, studying with the legendary Stella Adler. He wrote for beloved magazine Show Music, and later TheaterWeek and Playbill; he contributed a column for Broadway.com. He has slowed down since then, so our hopes for a sequel may be dashed. Perhaps I will have to pen the follow-up, and I already have the title: Not Since Lestat. Honestly, nothing could possibly hit its dizzying heights of badness.

But at the time of his writing, Carrie was the high-water mark of terrible musicals. It's obviously a bad idea, and then it was executed horrendously, with awkward tonal shifts, inappropriate costumes, a plot that was unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with the source material, and some mediocre music. And then, after intermission, it got worse, and secured its place in the annals of "Bad Theatre" History. As Mandelbaum puts it:

Chris sings, "It's a simple little gig/You help me kill a pig," and Billy, topless and with his hair in braids, smears his chest repeatedly with the blood of the squealing pigs. When the number ends, a few applaud dutifully, but most look at the stage or at each other with mouths open, just like the audience at Springtime for Hitler, the show-within-the-movie in The Producers.

(The Producers, in 1991, was still a movie, not yet a movie-turned-musical-turned-movie).

For show freaks, this has become a night unlike any other, the kind for which they have waited a lifetime. They cannot wait to get home to call their friends, and phone lines, particularly those on the West Side, will continue to steam for hours to come. These fans are aware that what they have just witnessed has set a new standard, one to which all future musical flops will be compared and found wanting.

If, like me, you're a schadenfreude aficionado (and especially if also interested in musicals), this is a must-read, and why have you not done so already? Stop reading me, start reading it!

Bad Movies We Love walks a similar path, about a different genre. I can remember seeing Showgirls and hoping for an adult (i.e. grown-up) film to be taken quite seriously, and immediately realised, no, I was seeing a Bad Movie We Love in the cinema on its opening weekend! I was able to enjoy the dreck through an entirely different lens, thanks to the book prepping me for the existence of such films.

There are also the individual messes, which sometimes get their own book. There's Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History. I enjoyed The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood, where I learned that Melanie Griffith got a boob job in the middle of filming (talk about things you never thought you had to specifically prohibit ahead-of-time). The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room was itself made into a film. And Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate shares the inside scoop on a film that destroyed a studio, written by a former executive from United Artists—yes, the studio still exists, but it had to be sold to MGM's owner Kirk Kerkorian.

But as fun as those books could be, they don't quite have the magic of the Mandelbaum book, and I haven't read any of them a second time, unlike Not Since Carrie's perennial magic spell. It's great writing, about not-so-great writing.

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Notes and Links

Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops - the gold standard for books about bad

Schadenfreude - sung by the original cast

Glory Days - should never have gone to Broadway. Lambs to the slaughter.

Carrie the Musical (Out for Blood) - kill the pig, kill the pig ...

The Devil's Candy - the best "making-of-a-disaster" book for film.