Worst Play/Musical You've Ever Attended

Prymate on Broadway. The highlight was watching Victoria Newman from The Young & The Restless get raped by a gorilla played by Andre DeShields. I thought the audience was going to riot.

A Dolls House with midgets and giant puppets. And screeching females.

A tryout in Boston of a musical biography of Louis Armstrong. Horrendous. For mainstream : Les Miz. When Fantine died I thought, "Lucky bitch. This is over for her. I have to sit through another 90 minutes of this crap."

"Love", off-bway, Fall 2001. Written by David Rosenthal.

ACT I: "Woman" enters, played by Kate Miller of "Moon over Broadway" fame. Tells the audience she's really really hot and all the guys want to fuck her (the gay men in the audience start heckling here). All woman are bitches, all men are hoes, and Oprah should be president.

ACT II: "Man" enters. Explains how badly he wants to fuck Heidi Klum, how viagra gives him "super cock", starts on a long stream-of-consciousness about I-am-you-you-are-me-we-are-all-one-and-all-is-love-love-love.

ACT III: "Man" and "Woman" engage in single-syllable verbal ping-pong for 20 minutes; every other word is "fuck". "fuck. me. fuck. what. fuck. you. fuck.love." etc. etc. etc. Then after some scenographic trauma, it ends with an offstage exchange: "I love you." "I love you too."

Epilogue: the actual playwright enters and explains why he wrote this - as the son of a rabbi he had a revelation that Jesus wants us all to help the homeless.

Indescribable.

A musical version of "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" starring $cientologist and child molester James Barbour. It was so dreadful I left at intermission.

3 hit shows I left at Intermission because I found them insufferable in spite of the rave reviews and audience-fawning:

The original Broadway production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses with Alan Rickman and Lindsay Whatshername.

Othello at The Donmar with Ewan McGregor and Ckwietel whosis.

On the 20th Century revival with Kristin Chenoweth.

I'm sure there were others. I'll get back to you.

Caroline, or Change.

THREAD CLOSED

Worst Broadway: "More to Love, a Big Fat Comedy" starring Rob Bartlett, Dana Reeve, and Joyce Van Patten. Worst Tour: "Starlight Express"

"Airline Highway", in Spring 2015, starring Julie White. Most endlessly boring piece of shit play I've ever sat through. Couldn't wait to get out of the theater!

Caroline or Change. Preposterous.

Years ago somebody posted being involved with a production of [italic]Annie[/italic] directed by -- and starring -- a lumbering tranny.

I've seen and walked out of many groaned but the one that popped into my head is "Thou Shalt Not" on Broadway which was written by Harry Connick Jr. My friend begged me to stay until the end even though she hated it, too.

The Addams Family with Doug Sills. Absolute torture.

Paj Joey '78 with Lena Horne.

Into The Light, 1986 Broadway musical based on the Shroud of Turin. Grotesque!

"And then there was that Off-Broadway show you took me to.....whatever it was called. A woman came out a yelled: 'I'm forbidden to love my brother' and then a man came out and yelled 'I'm forbidden to love my sister' and then everybody started yelling. All I could think think of was 'I'm forbidden to leave this theatre."

Worst Broadway Play: SEX AND LONGING. Unspeakable. I thought Sigourney Weaver would never speak to Christopher Durang again.

Worst Broadway Musical: BRING BACK BIRDIE (though THOU SHALT NOT is a close second)

Worst Off-Broadway Play: a Craig Lucas tie: GOD'S HEART and STRANGER

I loved CAROLINE, OR CHANGE.

Laughter on the 23rd Floor. It was awful. No laughter at all.

The 2005 production of Streetcar Named Desire. It was totally miscast. Stanley is such a rogue and could be hateful, but when played by a charming, compelling man, you can see why the women love him. Although John C. Reilly is a great actor, he is no Stanley. Also, Natasha Richardson was too strong to play Blanche. We were in the nosebleed seats and it was stifling up there. That is the only time I have ever walked out of a play. Sad, too, because that was the last time Natasha was on Broadway before she died.

Sunset Boulevard. Although the lead was a handsome gentleman.

Me too R3. Although I am not able to be so clever about my intense dislike for Le Miz.

FINDING NEVERLAND.

But I agree that THOU SHALT NOT and SEX AND LONGING were despicable, as well. I really thought SEX AND LONGING would be the end of Christopher Durang's career, and I was very pleasantly surprised when he finally bounced back in a big way with VANYA AND SONIA, although that wasn't till years later.

On Broadway -- Footloose

But I didn't have to pay.

R15 Wins this thread.

Aspects of Love

Anything by Andrew Lyod Webber

There's a really funny exchange in the Broadway musical version of THE GOODBYE GIRL (which was not good, but not terrible). Two people in the audience of an awful production are talking at intermission, and the lines go something like this:

"Would you say that first act was the worst thing you've ever seen?" "No, I think the second act is going to be the worst thing I've ever seen."

I hated Phantom of the Opera

Just thought of another hilarious line, from an Off-Broadway play called: A LETTER FROM ETHEL KENNEDY. A father is talking with his gay son about all the terrible musicals the son used to drag him to, and at one point dad says something like, "And then we went to see that piece of shit with Katharine Hepburn!"

I saw Stomp during its first American tour. Way overamplified and I was sitting way too close to the speakers. I was reviewing it so I couldn't leave. In theory, I could see it was an ingenious and well-produced show, but boy, did I not want to sit through two hours of of that. I tried to express all this in my review, which didn't matter anyway because the entire run at that venue was already sold out.

Wicked. Or any other play that relies on pyrotechnics.

[Bold] ROCK OF AGES OWNS THIS THREAD!

Well, let's see -- I've sat through CHU CHEM, WELCOME TO THE CLUB, MAIL, LEGS DIAMOND, and Debbie Allen as SWEET CHARITY.

But the worst thing I've ever seen was a church production of OKLAHOMA . The kid playing Curly had a hydrocephalic head, and Laurie had a honker of a nose on which perched thick coke bottle glasses. Her hair, even festooned with bows during the picnic scene, looked like it hadn't been washed in a decade. Aunt Eller could barely hobble about the stage, even with the aid of a cane, and was always late with her cues. The peddler-man's accent covered every region of the world. Ado Annie forgot the lyrics to her verse of "All 'Er Nuthin'", and no one would throw her the lines. Will Parker was about to walk offstage and leave her there while the orchestra kept playing (it had a full orchestra of out of tune instruments), but Ado latched on to his forearm with a death grip and wouldn't let go. And they both just stared at the audience. The ensemble sang the "Oklahoma" number in unison. And I had to stay and watch the whole thing because my niece was one of the naughty can-can dancers in the dream ballet, wearing a synthetic pink Woolworth's nightie to simulate the glories of Montmartre. You can just imagine how pedestrian the choreography was... But the best part was when the cowboys throw the baby twin dolls during the shivaree, and knocked Laurey's house down. There was lots of scrambling from stage hands and actors to try to put it back up. Someone had to stand next to either side of the house for the rest of the performance, to keep it from toppling over.

I may be attending my worst this weekend. The world premiere of "Hazel, a Musical Maid in America" based on Shirley Booth's Emmy-winning role. The writers of "Smash" are involved with aspirations of going to Broadway. It has bomb written all over it.

I also loved CAROLINE, OR CHANGE.

The original tour of NINE that played the Dorothy Chandler in LA in the eighties.

I love the show, but this was a mess.

They set the entire show in a train station. The woman dragged their baggage on stage and sat in it to sing the overture. Then they dragged it off at the end.

They had a screen above the stage showing supertitles, but since the show is in English, there was nothing to translate. So it said things like "All aboard!" when the women picked up their bags and left.

Both follow spots flickered. Pedals fell on the Germans, but got lodged in the scenery, only to disgorge at the next scene change.

And when the bitch producer sang her Follies Bergiere number, a large clock face descended from the flies for her to pose on and show off her legs, but the cable that held it was in between the supertitle screen and the (rear) projectors, so there was a shadow of the cable swinging back and forth over the (admittedly useless) titles.

The show got completely lost in this mess.

I'm usually pretty choosy about what I see in London because it's so expensive to visit and I have to fly over 7,000 kilometers to get there. But once I made a horrible mistake: In 2005, I bought tickets to see "The Countess" by Gregory Murphy. It turned out to be a plodding retelling of the love triangle between John Ruskin, John's bride Effie, and Ruskin's protege, John Everett Millais.

The play was so creaky and awkward. The dialog was absurd. The actors did their best with what they had to work with, but the audience mostly left at the interval. I didn't, because I had never walked out of a play before, and for some reason I thought the second part might be better. But it was ghastly! The few remaining members of the audience, one by one, gathered up their belongings and headed for the door, not even waiting for a scene change out of consideration for the actors' feelings. I think there were only two of us left in the audience by the final curtain.

Emma Thompson later wrote a screenplay about the same subject matter, and the playwright of this dreadful bomb had the nerve to sue her for plagiarism, as if he owned all rights to the Ruskin/Effie/Millais story. What a clown. He lost in court, of course.

Fun Home -- we get it your dad's gay and you're a dyke.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson was stupefyingly bad--the biggest POS I've seen on Broadway. The worst thing was that there was no intermission, and thus no convenient time to make an exit and head for the hills. I ended up sitting through the entire ghastly mess.

The Christina Applegate Sweet Charity. Poor Denis O'Hare looked like he wanted to bolt for the nearest exit in all of his scenes.

CAROLINE OR CHANGE was one of those "good-for-you" liberal message musicals that was a long, dutiful slog with a big 11 O'Clock shred-your-vocal-cords-and-the-audience-will cream-themselves moment. It wasn't the worst thing I ever saw, but I thought it was pretty forgettable.

FOLLIES!

R42 HERETIC!

The worst thing I ever saw live on stage was a college musical about Christopher Columbus. They really had aspirations that this would go to Broadway. Nope. Dreariest thing in creation. I remember a song with Columbus and his son singing mournfully to his dead mother. That was the tone of the whole show. I'd call it a poor man's [italic]Pacific Overtures[/italic], but even poor people deserve better entertainment than this.

CAROLINE OR CHANGE YOUR DEPENDS!

Sugarbabies with Mickey Rooney. My Dad bought us kids all tickets because he thought the show was hilarious. He said "if anyone doesn't think this is funny, there's something wrong with them". Half of us left at intermission. It was written for those who personally witnessed WWII, I think.

Cirque du Soleil's Zumanity.

"Light in the Piazza" -- Laughably awful. Central conceit: the lovely young woman is slow because she was kicked in the head by a birthday pony. I left the theater pretty sure the same thing had happened to me.

If we sent accused terrorists to see Wicked instead of wasting time on water boarding we'd have gotten WAY more info from them.

I was dragged to see Dreamgirls once. It seemed like hours and hours of banshees screaming every line with that godawful thing they all do, running up and down the scale without actually hitting the correct note. When the fat bitch yelled that famous song at the end of the first act I wanted the stage to collapse under her and swallow her whole.

Touring production of RENT. No, it wasn't because it was on tour. I would have disliked it on Broadway or in any other venue.

"Scandalous" aka "Saving Aimee" was pretty fucking awful. Carolee Carmello was good but the show is just inane.

"Cats" really is a stupid show.

ALW's Aspects of Love. Left at intermission. But on the way home, my date and I stopped at a smut shop, watched some movies in a booth while I fed quarters (dollars?) in a machine and I got orally serviced as some guy watched through a crack where the door didn't fit so well against the frame.

R53 brought HIV to Brooklyn.

R50 = racist asshole who wouldn't know great singing if it bit him in his racist ass.

Were you at the same show, r55?

Holy shit r11!

South Pacific. That damned Bali High song went on for twenty damn minutes. The same lyrics over and over. I seriously wondered if it was an intentional trance induction.

South Pacific is a terrific musical.

Bali Hai IS a rather annoying song.

So is "Happy Talk".

I'm sure it's great..on Broadway and with decent actors r59.

The tour of "Dr. Doolittle" with Tommy Tune.

I was hoping most of the cast and puppets drowned when the boat sank. But it was not to be.

Caroline or Change. Awful. Worst night ever.

Why did you guys sit through it? When it's bad, it won't get better. There's no payoff for stick it out. Sunk cost fallacy, people.

Nunsense

Off Broadway - Bug (peen in the last sceen doesnt make up for the terribleness)

London - Les Miz (never ending awfulness. If only Jean Val Jean had choked to death on that bread)

NYC - Bi-lingual West Side Story (way to ruin my favorite musical)

NYC - Oklahoma (oh my god that dream ballet went on and on and on)

R63 - my ride wanted to stay.

r34, please post about it here after you see it. I've been hearing about this thing for months and it does sound like a very bad concept. I'd be interested in hearing what it's really like.

Current worst: TUCK EVERLASTING Everything about it.

It proves that anything good in BOOK OF MORMAN was due to Parker and Stone, not Nicholaw (I don't care how many current shows he has on Broadway).

OMG, someone else saw Pal Joey with Lena Horne and Clifton Davis.

Yes, my parents dragged me to it and I had to wear an orange leisure suit.

"Bali Hai" is my favorite song from "South Pacific."

So what was that "I Am My Own Wife" thing all about?

Into the Light, mentioned above, and Sondheim's Passion. The only two times I've been in a Broadway theater that the audiences hated the shows so much they actually started talking back to the actors, heckled them and booed.

The real story of LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA was how WASP Matron pawns off her brain-damaged daughter to some "passionate" Italians who think it's beautiful for a grown woman to act like a ten year old. You know Mom was thinking "FINALLY! Got that tiresome girl off my hands and I'll never have to see her again. Back to my world of gossipy bridge parties, watercress sandwiches and fabulous hats!"

'BEETHOVEN'S TENTH ' with Peter Ustinov in 1984. It was so bad, we left the Nederlander Theater and went to a bar for drinks halfway through the play.

r48 We loved it. The audience loved it. We saw it at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Maybe you saw a local community theater production of it in Omaha, Nebraska?

Barry Manilow's "Copacabana: The Musical" in St. Louis. Snooze.

Misery - Bruce Willis was worse than you would have expected him to be.

Side Show from 2014. Simply horrendous.

American Psycho.... I don't understand all the praise. The show is a mess.

You know, R11...I'd watch that.

I'm funny that way.

R55=miserable cunt

The Woman In White. Andrew Lloyd Webber's horrible musical from 2005.

[quote] Years ago somebody posted being involved with a production of Annie directed by -- and starring -- a lumbering tranny.

That still sounds better than that Cameron Diaz thing.

R55 and its ilk are why we are stuck with a generation of non-singers who can't hold a note without adding an additional 5 or 6 notes to every syllable.

Rent.

I thought r34 was just being funny but my god, this thing is real. This looks like a Christopher Guest film. A bunch of retirees in Florida delude themselves with the idea of going to Broadway.

Sure, R80, blame ME for that. Fuck you and the horse cock you ride on.

R83 Oh, my. That seems like a parody. And the old queen who wrote the lyrics needs to rethink his look.

I did not know that "Hazel" the TV show was based on a single-panel comic strip from the 40s. I just did a Google search and read about ten of them. Not one was even remotely amusing.

R83 Who knew Warhol was still alive?

What the hell is Josh Bergasse doing in that video at R83? Isn't he about forty years too young for that crowd? He looks like he's contemplating harakiri.

R87 Hilarious.

Many of my worsts have already been mentioned, but I finally got around to seeing THE BOOK OF MORMON a few months ago, and both my partner and I hated it. So did the poor Australians sitting next to us.

I didn't think it was funny, or clever, or even well-performed. I'm an atheist, so maybe all the religion jokes got lost on me, but I do not understand why people are falling all lover themselves about this show.

I just do not see what is so funny about the village doctor’s recurrent cry “I have maggots in my scrotum” , but most of the audience was screaming with laughter.

I almost never consider an evening at the theater a wasted effort, but this is one time I really wished we'd stayed home.

Oh, and I loathed SLEEP NO MORE too.

R90 Maybe you are too old for Book of Mormon.

Lou Harrison’s gay-oriented opera Young Caesar, about the meeting and purported subsequent love affair between the young Julius Caesar and King Nicomedes IV of Bithynia. Originally written for puppets.

R91, I don't discount that possibility at all., however I really loved AVENUE Q, and enjoyed KINKY BOOTS, so it's not like I'm sitting around crocheting, hoping someone will revive THE RED MILL.

I'll argue that well-written, tuneful, clever musicals never go out of style, but yeah, I do realize that they're not writing the kind of shows I like anymore.

I have always thought that R72. Margaret totally pawned off her daughter on those Italians. People talk about how romantic that show is. Ha. HA! Nothing romantic about folks gettin' grifted.

I totally agree, R89. Book Of Mormon was insufferable.

R95, sorry to break it to you, but, according to R90, we're just a couple of old wheezebags, sitting in our rocking chairs, just waiting for the grim reaper to take us out of our misery

Oh I'm so dotty i messed up my references in R95.

R91 thinks we're too old

My vote goes for GOOD VIBRATIONS. Love the Beach Boys, but that show was diarrhea on a plate. Just awful. The audience should have been paid to sit through that bile.

I hated Aida and Urinetown. Just loathsome.

"AIDS: The Musical" in London. No words.

Maybe I'm just a terrible person, and I think I might be, but just LOVE going to those bombs of shows where the actors KNOW they are in a piece of shit and audience laughs, giggles and talks back to the actors on stage before leaving at intermission.

Once, years ago my Hollywood pals and I flew from LA to NYC for one reason only---to catch the new Anthony Newley bomb on Broadway (can't recall the name). All of us personally knew Anthony from our own film careers and knew that he was absolutely losing it. When the whispers of this impending theatrical turd made its way back to us in LA, we were not going to pass up the chance to watch our old and former friend die on stage!

Years later we were in NYC for business and had heard that THREE PENNY OPERA starring Sting was going to announce its closure in the next few days. It was poorly reviewed and yet had hung in there. By the time we went to see it it was so scarcely populated that we went into the balcony to check that out. The balcony was ENTIRELY EMPTY except for us and two young boy child theatre actors who apparently got some free tickets.

The play begins and the stage fills up with actors and handsome Sting raising a sword (?) as I recall, half of the actors---including Sting--let their eyes lift and wander untheatrically left to right across the balcony and you could noticeably see their jaws drop a little--no one in the balcony! We laughed so hard at this that we pulled out a blunt of the best smoke between Boston and Miami and got stoned. We even got the young boy actors stoned with us and pointed out to them how the play was falling apart and how Sting was absolutely exhausted and laughed and laughed together. Then one of those young actor boys asked us, "Are you guys gay?" By that point we all so stoned that when we laughed no sound came out of our 4 collective mouths.

I've seen so many plays bomb (The Moose Murders, anyone?), and bad comedians booed off the stage in comedy clubs---it is like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island---that I think maybe my personality is not all there.

I too was disappointed in "The Book of Mormon." Pretty much a one-joke show.

Did anyone go to see that show based on Bob Dylan songs?

I'm started to get the impression that the Osmond family are posting on this thread.

RENT, London production.

Loud music rattling from from overpowered speakers. I didn't like the source material, either.

Thankfully they allowed you to bring your drinks in to the theater.

It's a toss-up between Broadway productions of RENT and CATS.

[quote]I'll argue that well-written, tuneful, clever musicals never go out of style, but yeah, I do realize that they're not writing the kind of shows I like anymore.

I'm almost 33 and I feel the same way you do. I was raised on oldies and showtunes and that has left me utterly unimpressed by most of what passes for new music, and most of the new acts I listen to are retro-styled acts; singers who actually sing, musicians who play real instruments, songs that are melodically, harmonically and lyrically engaging. Where do they still write music like that?

Follies. Very overrated. Didn't care about any of the characters - no plot to speak of. Tired old piano bar songs.

R73 - Frank Rich stuck it out, so you didn't have to.

Two. In 1987, Oh Calcutta, with my ex-boyfriend. Yes, hugely popular a number of years, especially - I read - with Asian tourists (men) and made a ton of $$, but we could not BELIEVE just how bad it was.

The other, in - 1990? 1991? in SF; special production at ACT - possibly a tryout - of some musical about Hans Christian Anderson, staring John Glover. I like him, like giving new work a chance, but I had to leave at intermission, and I WANTED to leave about about 15 minutes. Yes, that bad.

Hamilton. I hate rap music.

Nobody else saw In My Life- the tourette's syndrome musical? Prymates was pretty bad. I actually think it was worse than Moose Murders (yeah, I saw it). I remember Into the Light as dull, but not the worst. I did not stay for the second act of The Grind, though that may have been because of my companion. I also walked out on a horrible musical at Playwrights Horizons of Remembrance of Things Past. I remember disliking Platinum. Welcome to the Club was pretty horrific as was Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public.

A filmed performance of Oh! Calcutta! (for those who want to witness the horror themselves):

GOOD VIBRATIONS, IN MY LIFE, and BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE GOES PUBLIC were, indeed, three of the most godawful shows ever to hit any stage. Hard to list them in order of awfulness, because each one was unimaginably bad in its own special way.

[quote]Current worst: TUCK EVERLASTING Everything about it. It proves that anything good in BOOK OF MORMAN was due to Parker and Stone, not Nicholaw (I don't care how many current shows he has on Broadway).

Hey, genius, Nicholas is a director and choreographer, not a writer. The fact that he has done several great shows and had hits with them (not just MORMON) might indicate that he isn't the problem with TUCK EVERLASTING. Now, the question is, why would he choose to become involved with TUCK of it's so lousy (I haven't seen it), but that is a separate question. Oh, and P.S., there was another writer on MORMON who might have had a little something to do with its success: Robert Lopez.

R110 - for you. It seems that Hans Christian Andersen was in 2000.

Oh! Calcutta, my French teacher in 1970 said "It's a phonetic doble entendre. To a francophone it sounds like oh! What an ass" Oh the blessings of a college education.

Caroline or Change:

Has anyone else been majorly let down by Pulitizer winning plays before? I saw both 'Night Mother as well as August:Osage County and failed to see the hype for either. August felt like a third rate Tennessee Williams rip off.

August: Osage County certainly did not live up the hype in the movie. But I put that down to the horrible, over-act-off between Meryl and Julia.

r118, Osage was another evening with the bickersons. It was clearly written as an acting exercise/showpiece for certain actors. I appreciated the performances, but the material did not live up to the hype. Jerusalem has the same problem. It was clearly an acting vehicle for Mark Rylance.

Waiting for Godot: The Musical.

Why add music to an existential classic. Just horrible. I only went to support a friend.

Did Godot ever show up, R121?

What a horrible idea...whats next? Hunger Artist!

1 Legs Diamond with Julie Wilson at 110 and Peter Allen trying to be 10.

2. Spring Awakening.

I hated If/Then.

If/Then was absolute drivel

Pre-Broadway WHITE NOISE which mercifully died in Chicago.

TRIUMPH OF LOVE, first Broadway preview. Wanted to kill myself.

PIRATE QUEEN , before N Y in Chicago. So horrible I laughed all the way thru it.

The local theater here did Oklahoma last year and cast Judd as Native American which put an entirely different spin on it. Instead of the outright villain, he seemed stereotyped and raged against from the get go. It was uncomfortable to watch. Changed the entire dynamic of the play.

"Mr Marmalade" off Broadway.

Script had an intermission after a particularly messy (as in trash strewing) scene. Rather than spruce up the stage with the curtain down, they sent out two of the stars, including Michael C. Hall, with vacuums to clean the mess as if it were part of the act. (They "spoke" but neither could be heard over the racket.)

Once the stage was cleared the 2nd Act dialogue began.

Had the curtain been allowed to fall, I'm pretty certain 2/3 of the audience would have left.

Legends with Joan Collins and Linda Evans.

Many loved it but I hated every second of PASSING STRANGE, especially that closeted troll, "Stew."

Worst Musical on Bway: THE NEWS starring Jeff Conaway. Awful, we left midway thru even though they had cut out the intermission. (to try to keep people from leaving, I suppose.)

Worst Play on Bway: STAGES. All I remember is an actress turning to the lead, saying "Your life is boring!" whereupon someone yelled from the audience, "So is this play!" Really bad but somewhat entertaining in it's awfulness. THe most bored I ever was had to be "Defending the Caveman." I spent most of the play reading the playbill, not understand why people were laughing. Cringworthy.

HAMILTON. I know it's supposed to be the greatest thing on Broadway in years. Maybe I was expecting too much. I found it tedious and over-miked.

Speaking Of Night, Mother that revival with Edie Falco and Brenda Blethyn was one of the worst things I've ever seen and I would've left at intermission but there wasn't one. These days I wouldn't wait.

I couldn't imagine performing that thing 8 times a week.

"Titanic, the Musical," not terrible just boring.

Co-sign on Cats.

I assumed that because it was such a huge hit, it would actually be something...more. Nope, just a bunch of grown ups in cat costumes singing truly awful songs. (Sorry, one song does not a musical make!)

American Psycho. No contest.

R135 that's my answer too - a touring production of Titanic, the Musical. It was of high quality community theater caliber, performance-wise, so I've heard worse, but the merely competent performers and the mind numbing skull made for an endless evening. The play felt 7 hours long. I was relieved when everyone died.

Mind numbing SCORE, that should say. Autocorrect is so weird sometimes.

Yes, If/Then and the revival of 'Night Mother are two more that are definitely among the worst shows ever. You people are good!

R12, R17, and R22 -- In total agreement with "Thou Shalt Not." I was a volunteer w/ Red Cross after 9/11 and was showing off/around a co-worker who'd never been to the city. We went to three shows, but got stuck with this absolute turkey via "the deal" at TKTS. Yikes. Had trouble living that down. Another terrible choice was "Hot L Baltimore" @ Steppenwolf.

R112 I also saw "In My Life" - it was so much of a trainwreck I loved it.

I can't remember when I hated a musical as much as I did "If/Then" (and I remember not liking "Thou Shall Not" (and that damn "Tugboat" song)) but I truly despised "If/Then."

And for an actor making a great play bad: Kelly McGillis in "Hedda Gabler."

And God help me, I'm going to "Fuck! Neverending" on Thursday.

Back when I was a Roundabout subscriber I saw a ludicrous review of Burt Bachrach songs starring the washing machine from Caroline or Change and the lovely but dead- between-the eyes Liz Callaway. Either that or Swing! starring Liz's very loud, empty and soulless sister.

I walked out of Blood Brothers in London. I hate shows that have adults playing children.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, starring soap star Michael Damian. Absolute torture for me, but then, when I thought it was over, they performed all the songs over again wearing white clothes, a nightmarish reprise.

Off broadway (WAY off): "How Now, Voyager". An all-male version of the Bette Davis classic tear jerker "Now Voyager" The cigarette scene alone had me out the door by the second act.

On Broadway: "Sunday in the Park With George", starring Bernadette Peters and Mandy Potemkin. At intermission(thank goddess there was one), My friend and I heard two queens providing the critique that would stick with us forever: "Not since Mame!"

I later sewed that line on my friend's AIDS quilt panel (he would die 4 years later)

I have 3, and provided some additional background as to why.

By far the worst was SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE - the Basil Twist water ballet. It was the first major review given by then-new New York Times drama critic Ben Brantley. We all rushed out and got tickets, because, well Ben proclaimed it had "wit .....that goes beyond words' and that it was a "visual portrait, so startling and immediate." Brantley even name-checked Disney and Balanchine in his review (see below)

So then my friend and I attend the performance. True water torture. I will never forget, the little boy 2 rows up, who said to his Mother out loud during the performance - "But Mommy, it is just clothes moving around a washing machine!" She "shushed" him, and I knew immediately the era of Frank Rich was dead and buried, and now everybody knows Ben Brantley as the pretentious fool we all suspected he was, and remains to this day. However that night, the star-making - or breaking - days of the New York Times began their decline.

SWING, starring the very self-important, very phony, very untalented Leslie Ann Warren. It was out-of-date and poorly staged. One aspect stood out - a very waspy male dancer who was just so bland but yet simultaneously slutty. His every movement was vulgar. Oh he was vile but not the least bit sexually stimulating to me. Well years later, a Village Voice article profiled him, and he talked at length about his being a male prostitute, before, during and after the run of SWING. No big surprise there.

Finally, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN by Mel Brooks was truly awful; a complete waste.

"Our American Cousin." Dreadful ... literally changed my life, and not for the better.

Return to the Sea, an eco-friendly drama about a beached whale and the humans who seek to aid it. A well-intended but inert pot-boiler whose villain is "The Man" as represented by a marine biologist. You know, one of those asshole marine biologists? The amateur cast were barely adept and many of them were oddly built to the point of distraction.

The romantic leading lady looked like Olive Oyl with a thick mane of hair down past her ass. Her male romantic interest was gray-bearded and rotund. In his overalls, he looked like Violet Beauregard after she turned into a blueberry. He was bigger than the whale, who incidentally, was a petite dancer hidden under a tarp for the first forty-five minutes. She portrayed the whale's spirit through interpretive dance, as channeled to the onlookers by a hippie chick. The trouble-making biologist had a wandering eye and when he turned his face the wrong way, it looked out into the audience.

My friend and I knew several people in the company, including the sour old woman who directed the piece. She planted herself between the sparse crowd and the front door of the little hall, as if daring us to exit before the first act ended. When intermission came at last, my friend and I had to hustle out the door and far down the road in order to explode in pent-up laughter safely out of earshot of the hapless cast.

I assumed we were leaving but my friend reminded me that we knew far too many people back there and that our absence would be noticed by audience and cast alike. Feelings would be hurt. So alas we trudged back in for act two. My one-word review after seeing the whole thing: Return to the Sea - should.

Did anybody here see the musical Contact? The clips I have watched on Youtube are so boring. What am I missing? I am surprised it won the Tony for best musical.

The god awful experience sitting through the dreadful ~ Caroline or Change on Broadway starring Tonya Pinkins

R150 it was as boring as the clips.

r11, was the big song "My Son Will Come Out Tomorrow"?

Does anybody remember They're Playing Our Song with Robert Klein & Lucy Arnez? Dreadful musical by Marvin Hamlish. Neither one could sing, dance or act. Lucy screamed every line.

I once went to a high school production of Fiddler On The Roof that my old roomie's baby sister was in. The high school was in the Low Country of South Carolina with southern accents so thick they could peel off wallpaper. "Tradition y'all!"

There was a small revival of FLAHOOLEY downtown many years ago. The musical itself was an interesting curiosity with some acidic political commentary and lyrics by Yip Harburg and some lovely melodies by Sammy Fain, but the cast was the least talented and most unattractive group of people I've ever seen on the New York stage. Afterwords, I turned to my companion and said "With all the talented unemployed actors in NYC, THIS is what they cast?"

Seen too much to really narrow it down to exact worst, but two shows come to mind.

For musicals, Dance of the Vampires was pretty much garbage from note one. I took my mom, who was visiting for (I think) Thanksgiving and we had house seats, third row center on the aisle for a matinee. I fell asleep midway through (which should have been impossible because the show was miked to the heavens) because I was so bored, and during the show, the ghouls com up through the audience and "scare" them. Some chorus member came up behind me to scare me and instead woke me up, and the look on his face when he discovered I'd been sleeping was more entertaining than the entire show.

For plays, boy I've seen a lot of crap. One that stands out is Wrong Mountain, which was on Broadway briefly in the late 90s. I think it was written by the same guy who did La Bete. The tix were freebies because no one but no one was going. The house was about half full in the orch the night we went and the mezz was closed. After intermission, a good half of the audience fled and the ushers told my friend and I, who had been seated in the back center of the orch, that we were welcome to move up. I said- you're lucky we're still here.

Rent. I hated it so much I refused to see it.

Three shows whose seconds acts I never saw: Wanted

Something's Afoot

Doctor Jazz (although it had no second act but bolted midway through it)

I have friends who are amateur actors/singers so I have seen more risible community theater productions than I can count.

But the worst professional show was during the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC. It was a review. I think it was of only Richard Rodgers songs.

Every song was done as if they were signing for the death. They acted out every syllable with hand gestures. It wasn't choreography; it was charades.

There was one song about "French-Fried Potatoes and a T-Bone Steak." Separate hand gestures for French, potatoes, bone and steak. Every fucking time the words were used, which was a lot.

We got the giggles so bad.

R112, That PH production was MY LIFE WITH ALBERTINE. Thank you for the reminder. So dreadful I ran at intermission. In that same zone was the snoozefest musical DREAM TRUE. The common denominator: Ricky Ian Gordon. Oh, that Proust piece was insanely dull. People here are listing BOOK OF MORMON and CAROLINE, OR CHANGE and LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA and even HAMILTON, but those choices just tell me they haven't been exposed to the gritty shitty under-layer of theater that regular theatergoers have been exposed to beyond the shows that make it to Broadway and get lots of press. The merits or lack thereof of those shows can be argued (and everyone's right about the American mom pawning off horse-kicked daughter to unassuming Italians), but there is some grime that's so bad and/or dull that no one would defend it. IN MY LIFE is one of those musicals, but that's one I don't regret seeing, as that literal giant lemon is something we won't see again. And LEGS DIAMOND had Julie Wilson, and chorus girls kicking it up in life-size champagne glasses. Even SEX AND LONGING had its merits, chiefly Dana Ivey, and that scene with the Supreme Court Justices portrayed by blow-up sex dolls.

I'd need to go through my Playbills to make a real list, but the following shows come most quickly to mind:

HUGHIE. Yep. That most recent revival. Was there first preview, and that's when the world discovered that O'Neill had written a play about a talking water cooler.

PRODIGAL. An Australian musical that was hailed as that nation's biggest hit at the time. It came here and withered.

The aforementioned MY LIFE WITH ALBERTINE at PH.

Tony Kushner's soporific adaptation of A DYBBUK at the Public.

Alan Bennett's PEOPLE at the National Theatre. Rarely has so much talent been used to produce so little.

The Traverse in Edinburgh had a trio of whoppers last summer: TOMORROW, THE GARDEN and, yes, their production of THE CHRISTIANS.

PS. R147, thank you, thank you, thank you. I too booked tickets for that SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE, and it was as awful and absurd as you've described.

PPS. I missed PRYMATE. Had been hoping to see it, but it closed before I got to the theater.

R157, WRONG MOUNTAIN was diabolically bad, wasn't it? How did that even get produced?

R161 is right on the money about what truly bad theatre is like. I despise Rent and Phantom with the best of 'em, but if that's the worst you've seen, you're lucky.

The only thing I remember about Wrong Mountain was the giant tapeworm that appeared at the end of Act I. Interesting that the playwright basically gave up the theatre after that. La Bete was very well received in London. Surely he could have parlayed that into more work. I guess the one-two punch of those Broadway failures was just too much for him to take.

I went into it thinking I would hate it, but Wit really, really moved me.

I truly wanted to like the Pippen revival, having loved the original show, but I didn't really like it.

PippIn, that is

I'm not sure which show I hated more: 'Rent' or 'Jekyll & Hyde' In both cases at intermission, most of the audience was looking at their watches, debating whether it was worth staying for the rest of the show.

The theatre doyenne at r161 is correct, of course. However, her history of indiscriminate theatre attendance is pitiful at best.

R166 - I was definitely one of the people who escaped Rent at intermission. It was god awful.

Good Lord, you haven't witnessed Hell until you've had to sit through 2 hours watching Madeline Ashton sing and dance her way through SONGBIRD!

I haven't seen it but I have a feeling THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY would fit this list. Am I right?

The worst thing I've ever seen on Broadway is THE THREE SISTERS. It was like a bad SNL skit, and Lili Taylor, Amy Irving, David Strathairn, David Marshall Grant, Eric Stoltz, Billy Crudup, and an unknown Justin Theroux were all terrible. Only Jeanne Tripplehorn was enjoyable--you don't hear that everyday! An acquaintance had seen it and raved about a young actress named Calista Flockhart (this was pre-Ally McBeal), but she was out that night.

It was my first trip to NYC, so of course I was bummed that the first Broadway show I ever saw was shit. It was so awful that we left at intermission, but not before one of my friends loudly asked during a quiet moment, "Did you remember to take the dildo out of the sink?" It was the only smile anyone in my section had all night.

We did go back at the end since we had planned to meet people there and saw a lot of the cast outside the theater. Billy Crudup was hot as hell, and Ben Stiller came to collect Tripplehorn and I wound up standing right next to him. He's about 5'5", tops.

r171 . Your friend who yelled out the dildo remark sounds charming. Worse than bad plays on Broadway are uneducated boors who make fools of themselves in public.

bump

R172 would feel better about it if they flung the dildo onto the stage.

L.A.: The original production of LEGENDS, with Carol Channing and Mary Martin. Mary Martin obviously was being fed her lines. The character of the black maid would've been a travesty in the 1930s. When they got high on pot brownies it was like The Carol Burnett Show at its worst. At intermission the audience just walked around looking at each other with huge eyes, not saying much.

New York: I'M GETTING MY ACT TOGETHER AND TAKING IT ON THE ROAD. Unbelievably embarrassing book and music. I loved the SCTV takeoff a year or so later: "I'm Taking My Own Head, Screwing It On Right, and No Guy's Gonna Tell Me That It Ain't!"

Regional: LEATHER DADDY. A musical in workshop. My then-partner knew the writer/lyricist and dragged me to it. Oh my God. I still remember the recurring theme song: "Leather daddy.... where isssss my leather daaaaaddy...." The script was a turgid drama about a caring top/master and a lonely bottom/slave who go through a bunch of disappointing relationships before coming together. We were sitting near the writer and had to dig our nails into each other's hands because we kept getting the giggles.

Bad musicals:

LEGS DIAMOND - Peter Allen jumping all over the place, then making fun of Julie Wilson for being "old."

ARI - musical version of Leon Uris novel "Exodus," with script by Uris himself, and that great "Holocaust Ballet" in Act I, where everyone rolls down a long ramp in a lurid red light.

BILLY - musical version of Melville's "Billy Budd," if you can believe that one, where Billy's "girlfriend" occasionally magically appears, for duets...

WORST Musical:

VIA GALACTICA: One of composer Galt McDermot's several follow-up shows after HAIR. Horrible piece about outer space people. Stage had 6 trampolines, on which everyone bounced to and fro, including stars Raul Julia and Virginia Vestoff, with Keene Curtis was a robot, pent up in a box with twinkling lights, lowered from the ceiling. The plot was nonsensical. At the end of the show, those of the audience that were left were actually booing and balling their Playbills and throwing them at the poor cast members.

And I think I saw that production of the musical version of THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR, with James Barbour. Was that in Burbank somewhere? I remember having high hopes for it, but it was just so bad, based more on the original book than the wisely changed movie. And the songs were unlistenable.

As for plays, Mart Crowley's sequel to BOYS IN THE BAND, called THE MEN FROM THE BOYS, was embarrassingly bad. Had trouble believing that what I was watching was actually written by the same author. Only played in small theaters in San Francisco and L.A., which was where I saw it.

Laugh my ass off at the "Theme from 'Leather Daddy'". Just the notion that it HAD a theme. I saw one in L.A. called "Blue is For Boys" with the whole cast singing its theme song up front and it is still stuck in my head 30 years later like an insect that crawled into my ear. Why they call it Equity Waiver.

R166 watches ...now they would looking and texting on their phones!

That British revival on Broadway of Strange Interlude aka Strange Quaalude starring Glenda Jackson. I couldn't take any more of my ears bleeding from the dreadful American accents so I got the fuck out of there after an hour.

The musical Fields of Ambrosia in London. I went to its opening night with the fellas from the Dress Circle shop and we laughed our asses off.

I actually saw I Can Get it For You Wholesale with Streisand and Gould back in 1962. I was 14. It was boring but the music was somewhat decent but it had a short run which it deserved. The plot was thin and it was all about the garment district in New York which presented the Jewish stereotype. I'm glad I saw it long before BS acquired narcissistic personality disorder because back then she actually enjoyed her fans and audience.

[quote]and that great "Holocaust Ballet" in Act I

Well, there's your problem right there. Everyone knows you save the "Holocaust Ballet" for Act Two.

I thought WICKED was pretty awful. Totally vacuous and contrived story about so-called female empowerment and friendship, which is forced fed to the audience over and over again without any genuine substance to support it.

Glinda, for example, was a horrible character who, because of her selfishness and narcissism, is the catalyst for practically every terrible event that happens to Elphaba in the show. And we're supposed to believe these two are BFFs? Any sane person would've dropped the house on that bitch.

[italic] Starlight Express [/italic] was shit. Ugly sets, ridiculous costumes with roller skates, absolutely forgettable music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Can anyone remember a tune from that mess?

r184: "Only you have the power to move me/Take me, hold me, mould me/Change me and improve me/It's not funny anymore." Even as a young gayling who adored Evita and JCS, I realized just how awful Starlight Express was.

American Psycho

[quote]The musical Fields of Ambrosia in London. I went to its opening night with the fellas from the Dress Circle shop and we laughed our asses off.

Oh God, yes. "The Fields of Ambrosia/Where everyone knows ya". And it was written by the dad from Silver Spoons! When it comes to memorable flop musicals, the British go above and beyond: Which Witch, Time, Bounty, Metropolis, Too Close To The Sun, Napoleon, Moby Dick, etc.

"he worst thing I've ever seen on Broadway is THE THREE SISTERS. "

That was a Roundabout Theater horror directed by the generally incompetent Scott Elliott. However, I liked Strathairn and Irving, but not Tripplehorn who I thought was a one-note Masha. But the production as a whole was pretty poor and most of the actors carried on as if they were in different plays.

After that and a truly horrid revival of A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY a few years later with Helen Mirren (in one of her rare poor performances) directed by another Scott (Ellis - who only seems to do the occasional musical well), the Roundabout wisely gave up on the Russians.

I can't believe no one has mentioned CARRIE, unless that is considered a camp classic

[quote]Oh God, yes. "The Fields of Ambrosia/Where everyone knows ya". And it was written by the dad from Silver Spoons

And he also wrote a musical version of [italic]Johnny Guitar[/italic]. Is he family?

IT Shoulda Been You last season on Broadway

I thought Caroline or Change was amazing!!

My worst is a tie: There was a musical stitching together dances with Burt Bacharach songs. It was choreographed by Ann Reinking and mind-numbingly awful. I think it was called Look of Love.

The second was Festen on Bway, based on the movie. It was a hit in London, but it stunk up Broadway with Ali McGraw as the matriarch. God, she was terrible,

Come to think of it, Brooklyn, the musical, was just as bad too.

My partner tells me the story of his worst musical experience: Thou Shalt Not.

He said when the curtain fell at the end, no one clapped. The audience just got up and left.

I saw Prymate. So terrible we STILL laugh about it a decade later.

I thought she was sensational, R169, sir.

R172 wishes someone had thrown a dildo IN HIM!!!!!! Most action he'd get since the Carter administration.

In terms of bad productions of great material, I was in one of the worst productions of [italic]HMS Pinafore[/italic] ever. The male lead was overweight, at least 20 years too old, and couldn't remember his lines. And Sir Joseph, who hadn't been a lad since Churchill was Prime Minister, needed to have his lines fed to him and still tripped over them. Additionally, the director added [italic]Trial By Jury[/italic] as the third act, having the male and female leads from [italic]Pinafore[/italic] get a divorce. That wasn't half as stupid as the attempt to have the ghosts of Gilbert and Sullivan provide historical commentary between every act. This made it at least 15 minutes longer than it needed to be.

That play with Farah Fawcett which only played previews on Bway was pretty terrible: Bobbi Boland. I wished I had kept the playbill.

I was surprised, however, that Farah's acting wasn't half bad.

A musical based on the life of Helen Keller, done entirely from her perspective. The show conisysed entirely of 3 hours of sitting in a pitch black theatre in silence , until at the very climax of the play the actors turned on the sprinklers and sang "W-A-T-E-R"

How was the Anne Frank musical? And the Pol Pot one?

I'm thinking about writing a musical about Joseph Stalin. Has that ever been done before?

I'll start raising the funds as soon as possible, R201!

I once walked out of a play called The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek. This was about 15 or 16 years ago at NYTW. It starred Michael Pitt and the original Becky from Roseanne. She was awful and I was bored senseless.

" An Evening with Patti Lupone & Friends"

a one woman show.

The Pillowman - All star cast of Jeff Goldblum, Billy Crudup, Željko Ivanek - but I just couldn't get into it. Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand such material.

Oh wow, I loved The Pillowman. Thought it was amazing. I am a huge Martin McDonagh fan, but I loathe his Irish counterpart, Connor McPherson, whose plays are some of the dullest evenings I've ever spent in the theater.

R167, it's the doyenne from R161 here. Pitiful "Indiscriminate theatre attendance"?

Well, you've made me laugh. The truth is I had two or three friends who were theater critics when I first moved to NYC, and I always got invited to a lot of things in previews that no one had seen or heard about, hence this list. (Or things their other friends wouldn't deign to see.) On top of all that, I saw a lot on my own, and often in previews. But how is my attendance pitiful? We're only talking about the worst here. I've seen the great stuff too. (Mostly.)

Regarding other comments, I did see that production of "The Three Sisters" with that all-star cast, and Calista Flockhart was a standout. The rest were so boring (save Jeanne Tripplehorn, mentioned already on this thread), but she had such life and vitality, and you didn't blame her for running over the rest of the cast.

I forgot all about "Brooklyn". What shite. And that original "Jekyll and Hyde" is possibly my least-favorite musical of all time.

"Festen" was brilliant in London. Simply stunning. When I heard how awful it was upon arrival on Broadway, I gave it a skip.

And I am with R206. I've never understood the appeal of "The Weir", and "Shining City" only exists because of its closing scene.

Aspects of Love (unbearable ) Bedroom Farce (laugh free "comedy") Cats (OY) The Miserable (I was) Naked Boys Singing (not even the cocks could make this junk work)

Many years ago in London HRH about Wallis and Duke, so boring majority of the audience fell a sleep.

Did anyone else see The People in the Picture? Book by Iris Ranier Dart (Beaches) and music by Mike Stoller. Donna Murphy played the young and old versions of her character- a Yiddish theatre actress in Germany in the 1930s/Holocaust.

The highlight was a ballet about the Jews hiding things from the Nazis in a milk can that must have been choreographed by Debbie Allen.

I once was dragged to this "experimental" piece by a friend. He was dating one of the guys in this disaster, where each actor gave a monologue about coming out. They thought they were being profound, but it was the most depressing, trite thing I've ever seen. One by one, the actors came onstage and delivered these sad stories about how hard it was to come out as gay or lesbian. It could have been interesting if maybe they were REAL experiences, but they were all the most clichéd stories (my mother made me wear a dress to church! my father forced me to play sports!) all written by one person--my friend's boyfriend (who gave himself the "juiciest" role, of course). My other friend and I had to keep elbowing and pinching each very hard so we wouldn't laugh. I had bruises all over my arm and side by the time I got home.

We get a lot of big touring shows in my city. I usually avoid most of them. But I get a lot of free tickets to things sent my way, so...

I saw the touring CATS and thought I'd kill myself by the end. Saw Pet Clark in SUNSET BLVD in the same theater--it wasn't as bad.

Recently saw the MATILDA tour and left at intermission. The set was beautiful, but the actors were all terrible and and since it was a matinee, there were little girls climbing all over the audience. Most of the moms had enjoyed too many mimosas at brunch and had checked out of parenting. The final straw was when the little girl in front of me literally climbed over the seat and into my lap, while the mom dozed. I don't hate kids at all, but what kind of parent isn't aware of something like that? She was a sweet kid, but it really creeped me out.

Surprisingly, Toni Tennille in VICTOR/VICTORIA (costarring DL fave, DENNIS COLE) wasn't bad.

R211 reminded me of a horrible play experience, one that still gives me anxiety if I think about it too hard. It was written by that Karen woman who caused the stir in the 80s with those government grants for her "art". Let me tell you, this show did not do much to support her case. The theatre was a former laundromat and there was no way out of the theatre -- unless you crossed the stage itself and became part of the show, which was not encouraged (this was not "Hedwig"). And it went on for HOURS. Hours and hours of esoteric nonsense. I shifted like a little boy with an itchy shirt in church the whole time and wanted to puke by the time we got free. When I think back on how much bad theatre I suffered through in the name of being "supportive", I am happy not to hang out with many actors anymore.

Starlight Express in London, 1999.

People dressed as trains. Stupidest thing I have ever seen.

Agreed, R207. I saw FESTEN in London where it was freaking brilliant and then a year or so later on Broadway where it was just abysmal. The difference a cast can make...

R215,

Since you saw both... Was it the cast that made all the difference? Was the staging the same? The show seemed foolproof in London. Then again, so did HUMBLE BOY.

R207

R216, you can add Coram Boy to the list of British plays that failed at the hands of American actors.

I will also add Dance of the Vampires to that list. The German production was a lot of fun. The American production was god awful.

[quote] The theatre was a former laundromat and there was no way out of the theatre -- unless you crossed the stage itself and became part of the show, which was not encouraged (this was not "Hedwig").

This happened to me at a play in Los Angeles in a small theater that had a curved audience seating with only one entrance. I was sitting across the auditorium and the stage came right up to the front row of the theater and on the same level. The play was so horrendously written AND acted and without an intermission and seemed to go on forever. I wrestled with leaving, knowing how rude it would be, but I was almost in physical pain, the show was so terrible. Finally I just got up and walked across the front of the stage and right out the door. Didn't care. I figured- maybe that'll let everyone in the show know they're in a stinker.

I win. I sat through Scent of Rain at a 99 seat theater in Los Angeles. It was notable because it starred Ryan Idol as a farm hand who falls for a farmer's gay son. It was a year of so after he fell out of the window in NYC. I did get to see his dick from the second row so it wasn't totally bad.

[quote]Since you saw both... Was it the cast that made all the difference?

I have a theory that English directors don't know how to cast American actors, let alone know how to direct them. English actors receive a totally different style of training.

The staging of FESTEN was identical, near as I could tell, but while all the characters in London seemed to have layers and inner lives, the Broadway cast was playing only the broadest strokes of the external narrative. And in the case of this play, that's the least interesting component.

"I have a theory that English directors don't know how to cast American actors, let alone know how to direct them."

Depends really. I wonder how much final say Rufus Norris had in the final casting on Broadway with all those producers and the larger budget. I can't imagine he REALLY wanted Ali MacGraw. I recall one reviewer saying that American actors are much more intent on being liked, so that can be hard for a director to fight.

Speaking of English directors who have trouble in NYC, there was this godawful production of HEDDA GABLER with Mary Louise Parker of all people, directed by Ian Rickson, who did a wonderful SEAGULL with Kristen Scott Thomas. Who in their right mind would ever cast Parker in that role? It had to be some idiot at the Roundabout (TV Stars On Broadway R Us).

I agree about that Roundabout Hedda Gabler but ML Parker can be very good on stage. She's done a lot of good theater and was wonderful in Proof among other shows.

But that Hedda was just excruciating.

The Knife at the Public with Mandy Patinkin as a sex change. 1987. Only thing I remember is his coming out at the end as a woman in size 17 flats, a pleated skit and a cardigan sweater. Queens in the house were screaming in ecstasy. Mary Testa was in it too. And the great David Hare wrote the book. Go figure.

Taller Than a Dwarf. Mathew Broderick speaking with a weird voice. First and last Broadway play I've walked out in the middle of a scene prior to intermission and on a Saturday night -- excruciating.

Wings @ 2nd Stage (there are no words)--2 seconds into the play--a woman with post-stroke with communication disabilities, strobe lights, disjointed offensive sounds (maybe music?) --please god get me out of here now or just kill me!

R213 you are talking about Karen Finley, now a 60 year old NYU professor. NYU - what a surprise.

yes r345

The "Lord of the Rings" musical, a 30 million dollar behemoth 3.5 hour long ordeal,in which much of the dialogue and songs sung in one of the fictional languages developed by Tolkien, which finally killed Toronto's delusions of being the world's third most important theatre city after New York and London.

"Bored of the Rings" was the last in a long line of mega-musicals produced by Garth Drabinsky's Livent and the Mirvish Entertainment Group. Specatcular failures like "Napoleon, the Musical", "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" ( pre-Disney version) and "Dracula".

The have been rumours of someone being idiot enough to write a "Godzilla" mega-musical that might be in development in Toronto at present, God Help Us All!

Democracy in London was fantastic but on Broadway was a snoozefest. I think this was mostly because James Naughton had zero chemistry and little skill to appropriately play West German chancellor Willy Brandt. I hope it gets revived here some day with a much better actor.

Little House on the Prairie with Melissa Gilbert. Came through Dallas on it's way to Broadway, left at intermission and it died on the road.

Wait... was Jodie Foster in a musical?

[quote]Back when I was a Roundabout subscriber I saw a ludicrous review of Burt Bachrach songs starring the washing machine from Caroline or Change and the lovely but dead- between-the eyes Liz Callaway. Either that or Swing! starring Liz's very loud, empty and soulless sister.

Oh, come on, SWING wasn't a bad show -- certainly not bad enough to deserve a place in this thread. But the Bacharach show, absolutely. Also, SWING wasn't the show with Lesley Ann Warren. That was DREAM, a Johnny Mercer review

I agree that MLP in HEDDA GABLER was beyond awful, so much so that I thought it would end MLP's stage career. But it didn't, and she has been really bad (though not quite AS bad) in several things since.

I dare anyone to make it through this Joss Whedon musical starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion.

Here is the broadcast version, just try to watch it all the way through without becoming nauseous I double dare you!

R214 I'd forgotten about STARLIGHT EXPRESS. I paid full price, ticket broker fees and all, on my first trip to London and hated every second of it.

I kinda liked LEGS DIAMOND. It was one of those train wrecks that are so bad they're good. But then, I was a big Peter Allen fan. I even play the CD once in awhile.

Unlike BIG DEAL, which was just a crashing bore.

The first show I ever saw in NY was ONE NIGHT STAND, a 1980 musical by Jule Styne and Herb Garner (A THOUSAND CLOWNS, I'M NOT RAPPAPORT), starring Jack Weston and Charles Kimbrough. I loved it....it closed in previews, so what do I know?

Unfortunately, with ticket prices what they are, in the past decade I have become quite selective in my theater-going. Spending $100+ for a rotten evening just isn't in the cards, not if I want to retire before age 70.

Rotten cabaret is so common it deserves a thread all its own, but as the exceptionally obnoxious show I saw features Richard Kind and Charles Grodin, I think it qualifies to be included here. The two actors had what they described as a cabaret 'tryout' at the Metropolitan Room (with a $50 cover). The house was packed and the two actors received a lot of applause when they appeared on stage - but the next 45 minutes of this 'tryout' showed that they had clearly booked the room on a whim or a nasty joke. It featured the two of them talking to each other a la "What do you wanna do?" "I dunno, what do YOU wanna do?" and cracking a few bad jokes to each other and not even acknowledging the audience, which quickly grew restless. Finally they decided they would sing their favorite songs from Jewish summer camp and asked the stone-faced audience to sing among and clap. Lots of people walked out at this point and the clearly shaken staff apologized to every one "I'm sorry - I had no idea it would be that bad."

They've never appeared in cabaret since.

Was this it, R234?

A musical based on P.G. Woodhouse's Bertie Wooster/Jeeves stories. Can't remember the title. Incomprehensible, deadly dull and charmless. We lasted less than halfway through the first act.

The Moony Shapiro Songbook. It was bizarre. Jeff Goldblum was adorable but looked embarrassed to be on that stage.

Hamilton

That was it, r235. Excruciating.

R236, BY JEEVES by Andrew Lloyd Webber? It had one lovely song as I recall....but it otherwise was pretty bad.

R236 "By Jeeves" by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Lestat. Elf.

r210 I fell asleep during The People in the Picture. So far the only show I've fallen asleep at on Broadway.

My American Cousin.

Oh, my kingdom for a couple of stiff drinks and tickets to Leather Daddy.

My sister fell asleep through most of the first act of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson. She was in the 5th or 6th row on the center aisle. I'm sure Benjamin Walker had to notice she was sleeping. She woke up at intermission and told me "I really don't understand this play."

I wasn't really impressed with the play, but the theater looked amazing.

R224,

My friends and I all called that play Dumber Than A Dwarf. It definitely should be a contender. Matthew Broderick was the best thing about it. Parker Posey was so lost on that stage. I hope she was on drugs. Otherwise, I'd have no way of explaining what a non-performance she gave. And one of the elderly men in a big supporting role was embarrassingly bad, worse that Posey.

When my group saw it, there was no intermission. We were stuck. I think it was later reported that the play had been in a drawer. Whoever removed it from that drawer should have been punished.

And as for Wings at Second Stage, I'd actually been excited to see that play, as the original had run on Broadway and won a Tony for its lead actress. Well, I took a first date to see this, and we were put on the front row, and Jan Maxwell did her best but the whole production was painful and awkward, as was the rest of my date, cause, embarrassingly, I fell asleep during the show, and my date did not, and he was pissed off by my choice. We had an okay dinner afterwards, but I definitely didn't get any sex that night, and didn't deserve any.

A revival of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" starring a cabaret singer named KT Sullivan, co-produced by Tony Randall's theater company. Ms. Sullivan was AWFUL, the cast was terrible, a chorus of SIX people and the cheapest sets imaginable. One door wouldn't stay shut, and as each actor came on stage they tried to fix it. It was not as if the stage manager couldn't have told them backstage to freaking leave it alone! It was far more interesting than anything going on onstage!

The other was Joe "I can't direct" Mantello's Broadway effort, a rancidly unfunny comedy called "What's Wrong With This Picture?" that was an unintentional incest comedy, starring Faith Prince, who must have been reduced to eating cat food to take this rotten job! Embarrassing for everyone!

A musical about going through a sex change? Really? Why? Unless you saw the NY Public Theatre's "The Knife", you don't know what stultifyingly boring or truly pretentious means. Mandy Patinkin stunk, as usual. All evening I wondered if I was the only person willing to personally castrate Mandy, just to get the piece of shit to end!

"Wicked" wasn't the worst, but it was a big disappointment. It was a juvenile show meant for 13-year old girls.

"42nd Street" was boring and dated.

"Noises Off" was terribly unfunny, with Dorothy Louden no less.

To a previous poster: I loved "I Am My Own Wife" and "Contact."

Last autumn a friend with comps dragged me to see WOULD YOU STILL LOVE ME IF? No.

The play involves a lesbian couple, one of whom is secretly planning to transition into a male. Her surgeon is also a lesbian who is called the "Michelangelo" of this kind of operation. (The surgeon performed the operation on her own partner and then he jilted her for a straight woman. Men.)

I had never seen Kathleen Turner on stage and was hoping her star power could save this earnest turkey at least a little, but no dice. She took over directing and an acting role after the original director and an actress quit. They must have seen the massive handwriting on the wall.

To be fair, the four actresses did their best to get John Anastasi's clunker off the ground, but it was impossible when with just a few tweaks it could have been a great Charles Busch play.

Don't forget about COPENHAGEN - the first time I ever left at intermission and knew I would be missing nothing in Act 2 given it was all hypothetical anyway.

MAKE MY DORIS DAY. Great title but horrible show. Vanity jukebox musical. The emotional "high point" was a rendition of Always Something There to Remind Me. Between verses, the heroine found various things lent to her by gay men who died of AIDS before she returned them.

R231 - Swing! starred Liz Callaway's boorish, attention whoring sister, not Lesley Ann Warren. The production was at the level of OK community theater. Just remember being bored out of my skull.

[quote]Lesley Ann Warren.

Could you be thinking of Dream? LAW was in that one and it was pretty dire.

"The Wacky World of Doctor Mengele!" I hate theater in the round. And audience participation.

R250 Poor Kathleen Turner has certainly been in her share of awful plays. I saw her in HIGH, where she played a tough-as-nails nun who got to wrestle with a naked Evan Jonigkeit while was trying to attack her. Sadly, even the nudity couldn't save this show, it lasted 7 performances.

An Off-Broadway stinker called "Men of Manhattan." My husband and I still hold that as the gold (lead?) standard of awful plays.

On Broadway back in 1982 the musical Waltz of the Stork w/ Melvin & Mario Van Peebles

Rent is the worst. Thank god Jonathan Larsen died before more of his plagiaristic blaring treacle was dredged upon the stage.

I thought RENT was a Tony award winning musical?

r229 My friend was in that tour. On the plus side he said that Melissa Gilbert was very sweet and gave them all small trees for Christmas.

R227, I considering flying up to Toronto to see Lord of the Rings. Thank goodness I didn't

[quote] Taller Than a Dwarf. Mathew Broderick speaking with a weird voice. First and last Broadway play I've walked out in the middle of a scene prior to intermission and on a Saturday night -- excruciating.

Doesn't he do that voice for every show now?

[quote] Wings @ 2nd Stage (there are no words)--2 seconds into the play--a woman with post-stroke with communication disabilities, strobe lights, disjointed offensive sounds (maybe music?) --please god get me out of here now or just kill me!

[quote] And as for Wings at Second Stage, I'd actually been excited to see that play, as the original had run on Broadway and won a Tony for its lead actress. Well, I took a first date to see this, and we were put on the front row, and Jan Maxwell did her best but the whole production was painful and awkward, as was the rest of my date, cause, embarrassingly, I fell asleep during the show, and my date did not, and he was pissed off by my choice. We had an okay dinner afterwards, but I definitely didn't get any sex that night, and didn't deserve any.

I was about to respond to these thinking you both meant the musical version and I was about to defend it, but then when I saw 2nd Stage, I realized you were talking about a revival of the play.

Did anyone ever see the musical version of the play which was done at the Public Theater in the 92-93 season? It was uneven, but had some very lovely moments and one song in the 2nd act (I think called "Snow") which was just heartbreaking.

[quote] A revival of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" starring a cabaret singer named KT Sullivan, co-produced by Tony Randall's theater company. Ms. Sullivan was AWFUL, the cast was terrible, a chorus of SIX people and the cheapest sets imaginable. One door wouldn't stay shut, and as each actor came on stage they tried to fix it. It was not as if the stage manager couldn't have told them backstage to freaking leave it alone! It was far more interesting than anything going on onstage!

Yes, this show was supposed to make KT Sullivan a star. What it actually did was send her scurrying back to Cabaret for good (which is where she belongs, because she's terrible).

I used to work for NAT, but by this point I had left the company and came back to see this on a freebie matinee ticket. Just dreadful all around with one exception- I though Karen Prunczik, the ex-Mrs. David Merrick (well, ONE of them) was really very good. She certainly stole the focus from fat, hideous, out of tune Sullivan.

[quote]a chorus of SIX people

My God! Why so many?!?

R264 never heard of KT Sullivan

R252 That sounds DREADFUL.

R257, What was that about?

I've worked with KT Sullivan. Hmm... She's a hard worker, and she does try. There's just nothing special about her.

I'm really enjoying this thread. Here is a link to the Broadway show "Victor/Victoria" starring the ever loverly Miss Julie Andrews before she got her vocal cords circumcized.

R258 - at least that musical gave us this!

I love seeing KT Sullivan's name pop up here. I met her when I was invited to her apartment by a family friend for the final dress rehearsal of a new cabaret act back in 2009. Apparently the only way her accompanist could get her to rehearse was if she could throw a party at home. She was incredibly warm and friendly, and very eccentric. I was 18 or 19, and will never forget when she answered the door in a colorful sequin robe, still in the process of getting ready. It was a great experience from my first few months in NY that I'll never forget.

MURDER STRIKES OUT. My bitch mother-in-law gave away the surprise ending.

A Chicago production of Terrance McNally's "Corpus Christi."

Unbelievably bad -- and no intermission to sneak out in!

A production of Fat Pig by Neil Labute. Horribly written work.

Wish I could have seen some of the bad plays and musicals already mentioned. The worst one in my memory is Nick & Nora, the musical adaptation of The Thin Man (with William Powell and Myrna Loy). About the only saving grace was seeing Barry Bostwick.

I saw The Lord of the Rings in London about ten years ago. The Lothlorien sequence with the Elvish songs was the best thing in the show. And the guy who played Gollum was pretty fun and had some great climbing up and down the proscenium.

[quote][R184]: "Only you have the power to move me/Take me, hold me, mould me/Change me and improve me/It's not funny anymore." Even as a young gayling who adored Evita and JCS, I realized just how awful Starlight Express was.

In elementary school, my music teacher actually made this the fifth grade musical. I was younger than that, but even then and seeing the show stripped of special effects and faux-TRON costumes, I wasn't terribly impressed with the show or its ridiculous pseudospiritual ramblings, and I can't remember anything other than the title song.

When I had to sit through this shit!

I saw STARLIGHT EXPRESS and sexy understudy Rusty Sean McDermott glided downstage, removed his helmet and fell right off the fuckin stage. What a mess.

Too much!

THE APPLE DOESN'T FALL....a hilarious Broadway comedy about Alzheimer's . Florence Stanley had a line about a "cat making pancakes" and Leonard Nimoy directed. Shit. Show.

A Doll's Life at the Mark Hellinger. It was about what Grossman, Comden and Green thought happened to Nora after she slammed that door. Remember she worked in a sardine cannery, got involved with a lawyer and became a prostie.

Prince of Central Park with Jo Anne Worley. Walked out at intermission. Tree house set in the park. I had to see her do her shtick with screwing her index finger into her dimple and making that noise. That business got the only laugh in Act I.

Remember that M. Broderick did a scene wearing only a towel in Tall Than A Dwarf and his legs were all bruised. Maybe he was on aspirin therapy. Not much hair on them either. Still the play was by Elaine May and it had funny bit and pieces.

[quote]There was one song about "French-Fried Potatoes and a T-Bone Steak." Separate hand gestures for French, potatoes, bone and steak. Every fucking time the words were used, which was a lot.

Sounds like it was directed by Miss Mitzi Gaynor.

Passion.

Thread closed.

Nope, still open.

R115, R110 here. Thank you. Afraid, the older I get, the more years just meld together, alas...

[quote]An Off-Broadway stinker called "Men of Manhattan." My husband and I still hold that as the gold (lead?) standard of awful plays.

Oh, I saw that! It was supposedly a delightful-but-sometimes-serious sketch review about contemporary gay Manhattan, from the early 90s. It was so awful. It relied on just about every cliché about gay men imaginable.

Men of Manhattan was written by John Glines. Didn't he write a whole passel of awful gay plays?

John Glines is a Tony winner as producer of Torch Song Trilogy. several Drama Desk awards and more.

DISAPPEARING ACT off Broadway. Absolutely offensive and awful

I was lucky enough to see the opening night of the legendary musical BERNADETTE here in London years ago, the musical version of the film 'Song of Bernadette'. It was sublimely awful. I've never heard an audience genuinely scream with laughter before or since.

Speaking of Chicago plays.....A company there called Hell in a Handbag does those spoof/parody plays. I saw one and it was clever (Mommie Dearest meets Scrooge) so I went back.

Their artistic director is a huge cunt and profoundly unfunny. The shows I got tickets for? A bad Hitchcock ripoff, like being trapped in hell with extra heat and no water, with a basic plot that makes Helen Lawson seem fresher than morning dew on a daisy. And then afterwards, they aggressively try to shake you down for MORE money.

I love Hell In A Handbag! Are you talking about The Birds? It was pretty damn brilliant. Or did they create something original that didn't work?

But yes, that company always does seem to be aggressive about procuring the dollars. And the A.D. does seem... unpleasant.

R290: Was "Disappearing Act" a series of songs (some about AIDS, some about contemporary gay life, and more)? If so, I saw it in Boston during the '80s in a little cabaret in Club Cafe (or as we used to call it, Club Half Gay).

Christy Brinkley in the touring version of Chicago. Not only could she not sing or dance, she could barely speak. The only show I never walked out of. Very cruel of them to allow her up on that stage.

A musical about the shroud of Turin called Into the Light". It starred Dean Jones. Not sure it lasted a week.

[quote] Are you talking about The Birds?

I guess they did one version, it got raves, then they redid it and we went and sorry, it was dreadful. (Like I said, I enjoyed their earlier show...though it really is a situation of a little goes a long way, and best enjoyed with chemical alterations.)

And the Joan Crawford queen is a huge, unpleasant cunt. I've done storefront theater for almost twenty years and was unimpressed with his cuntery. If it's an act, it's a really old, tired, over the top one.

The Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm on Broadway in 1999, a revue of Gershwin songs with a “hip, sexy, modern take.” Among other things, it included a lesbian couple singing, "Isn't It a Pity?" which was deemed au courant and even somewhat daring or something. I think it was not the lesbo kiss as much as one of the gals unzipping her top at the end to cheapen the moment.

The cast included DL faves Michael Berresse and Patrick Wilson. Also starred Darius de Haas, Adriane Lenox, Sara Ramirez, and the one and only Orfeh.

The New York Times sent Peter Marks, who decreed: “Instead of warm echoes of the New Faces series on Broadway, you get tinny and sweaty reminders of television's 'Star Search.'

Charles Ishwerwood (still at Variety at the time) crowed: “Fascinating it most assuredly is not, unless you're the kind that ogles car accidents.”

NY Magazine’s John Simon proclaimed: “Note the names Mel Marvin, Larry Hochman, Paul J. Ascenzo, and Joseph Church. These are the arrangers of the great songs in the revue The Gershwins' Fascinating Rhythm. On the evidence of what is perpetrated here, they should stick to arranging flowers in a second-rate funeral parlor.”

Nascent theater blog Talkin’ Broadway sent a critic who provided the most succinct summary of the evening: “Noel Coward once wrote a theme song for a television special he and Mary Martin did in the 50s titled ‘90 Minutes is a Long, Long Time.’ Too true.”

What I most remember is that my mother was visiting NYC for the first time, and I talked her into going to something new (she wanted to see Smokey Joe’s Café, which she’d already seen on tour). You know, just in case it was the next big thing. We still laugh about it to this day.

[298] Thank you for reminding me of The Gershwins' Fascinating Rhythm. Orfeh was the first tattooed performer I had ever seen on a B'way stage. Think it was on her ankle or leg. She went on to even greater heights in Legally Blond. Went with a friend and his mother and the mother had dementia. She started yelling from the mezzanine at the performers.

Remember Blair Brown coming out of a huddle of nuclear physicists in COPENHAGEN and uttering the line "Plutonium"!.

She's a hard worker, and she does try. There's just nothing special about her. So WTF is that supposed to mean...LOL she's a no talent wannabe obviously...

R295 Barry loves her and she's welcome back anytime on Broadway

[quote]I was lucky enough to see the opening night of the legendary musical BERNADETTE here in London years ago, the musical version of the film 'Song of Bernadette'. It was sublimely awful. I've never heard an audience genuinely scream with laughter before or since.

Thanks, r291. I never heard of BERNADETTE, but it sounded wonderfully horrible so I did some Googling. Found this at Broadway World:

I was there on opening night. I remember Sheridan Morley the next day on television giving his review: "It was like watching a plate of liver."

Actually, it was wonderfully, spectacularly awful. I still tell stories about it. At one point the woman sitting next to me, beautiful dress and a string of pearls, was crammed on the floor and so breathless with laughter that she started saying, "I'm going to pee! I'm going to pee!"

In the earlier previews, there was the most naive and stunning exchange between the policeman and Bernadette as he tromped around the grotto:

Policeman: Where is this lady? I don't see her! Bernadette: Please, monsieur! You're standing on the Holy Mother's bush!"

I've never heard a shriek of laughter like that from an audience ever. EVER.

From that same BW thread: BERNADETTE apparently also involved a giant pile of feces falling from the sky.

SPIDERMAN back in 2012 (?) hands down. What a mess.

I saw a bootleg video of a production Elton John's [italic]Lestat[/italic] and I couldn't believe it actually got funding; if it hadn't been made by Elton John, it wouldn't have even made it to dinner theater in Dubuque.

Speaking of KT Sullivan, she introduced the former manager of Dorothy Loudon at a tribute to Loudon at the Paley Center on West 52nd Street this past Wednesday and in introducing the manager, she though he hailed from Southampton, London.

OMG, R2, I saw that same freakish production of "A Doll's House" at the Kennedy Center too. Images of that show are permanently seared into my brain even to this day. It was just incredibly disturbing. I also recall one of the children being played by a "pinhead" (a person with microcephaly) which I just could not handle. The whole thing was pretty much a nightmare.

Nobody mentioned "The Blonde in the Thunderbird"? The TRUE MUSICAL story of Suzanne "Boney Mahoney" Summers. Featuring said Ms Summers in a black cat suit, displaying her gigantic camel toe?

"The Pirate Queen"'s second act had the lead, giving birth, crawling across the stage, sword in hand, fighting rouge pirates.

Just off the top of my head, tough:"Ghost", "Hands on a Hardbody", "Living on Love", "Honeymoon in Vagas", "Little Woman", the revival of "On a Clear Day", "9 to 5", "The little Mermaid", "Tarzan" "Twilight of the Golds", "the Scarlet Pimpernel", "Bombay Dreams", "Enron", "Ring of Fire", "Never Gonna Dance", "Urban Cowboy", "High Fidelity", and "Viagra Falls".

DISAPPEARING ACT was wretched! I remember a terrible ballad about a married man pulling off into a rest stop.....

Yuck Neverending.

Shuffle Along will be remembered here for sure.

"The Apple Doesn't Fall... " - April 1996 - Lyceum Theatre. Written by Trish Vradenburg, one of the writers of TV's Designing Women, starring Florance Stanley of Barney Miller/Fish, and directed by Leonard Nimoy this was a zany, madcap comedy about Alzheimers.

Mary Louise Parker in the Roundabout's HEDDA GABLER was just about the worst mish-mosh of styles. She seemed bored while Peter Stormare gave a moustache-twirling, eye-rolling tribute to silent film melodrama. Only poor Michael Cerveris seemed to know what play he was in. At one point someone in the audience actually screamed at the stage, "Bad Acting!" We had to leave at intermission for fear that the audience was going to storm the stage.

I remember seeing a production of THE CHAIRS on Broadway that made me want to blow my brains out. And also a production off-broadway of HAPPY DAYS with Lia DeLaria - one of the longest, most incoherent evenings of my life.

The Seafarer by Conor McPherson. Despite an amazing, Tony-winning performance by Jim Norton, the play was just interminably dull and excruciating to sit through. Had I not brought an elderly friend who I had taken out for a fun evening, I'd have bailed 30 minutes in.

The worst play I've ever attended was a performing arts high school's adaptation of Wuthering Heights in MIME. Yes, mime.

What do I win, Don Pardo?

Take Me Out was never boring.

Has anyone here at DL ever seen DUDE: The Highway Life? Also by Galt McDermott post-HAIR, it was supposedly very ambitious and a huge flop.

That Jesse Eisenberg play at the New Group last season. Pretentious nonsense, like everything he does.

Basically, anything at the New Group is horrendous. That Holly Hunter thing from two years ago -- a David Rabe revival. I left at intermission. Phony baloney acting trying to pass off as "style." Yuck.

I saw Dude and also Via Galactica, both huge expensive flop from the early 1970s. Both too boring to be interesting in any outrageous way.

I also saw Rockabye Hamlet which I loved. Directed by Gower Champion, of all people, and with very ingenious staging and design. Beverly D'Angelo as Ophelia died by strangling herself with her mic cord. Unforgetable!

Don't forget Me Jack You Jill, another clunker. Opened and closed on opening night. So bad that the audience talked back to the actors, finishing their sentences . Sylvia Sydney, Lisa Kirk, Barbara Baxley, and Russ Thacker. Produced by Adela Holzer and directed by Harold J. Kennedy.

In Into the Light, the nuns hiked up their habits to show a bit of leg when they tapped. And then there was that mime....

Audience: Oh NO! Not that MIME again!!!

Passion was about this hot young soldier being stalked by Donna Murphy. After destroying his life, she threw herself onto her knees, grabbed him around his legs and clamped him to her. "What can I do to show you how much I love you?" she cried. "LET GO OF HIS LEGS" came the reply from the balcony.

Later, a doctor came out and announced she had died. A huge wave of cheers and applause swept the audience.

What was that Adam Rapp play from about seven years ago? Red Light Winter, I think. "Edgy" in the worst and most pretentious possible sense of that overused and overcoveted word.

All the mentions of Aspects of Love remind me of a joke doing the rounds at the time of the original production. Roger Moore was supposed to be in it but he quit during rehearsals. The joke went: Q: Why did Roger Moore quit Aspects of Love? A: Because when Andrew Lloyd-Webber found out he couldn't sing, dance or act he wanted to marry him.

[quote]fighting rouge pirates.

Rouge pirates make me blush on my cheeks.

R323, totally agree, and yet it was a Pulitzer finalist that year. What a travesty.

Love it, R324!

I'd forgotten all about that Mary-Louise Parker HEDDA GABLER. Yes, it was appallingly bad, with Peter Stormare the worst offender.

ENRON was also shit.

THE SPOILS, the Jesse Eisenberg play from last season, didn't bother me so much. It was a bunch of malarkey when all was said and done, of course, but it wasn't boring. Boring is the worst.

I actually sat through Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. A nephew of mine thought it was great and wanted me to see it. It was better than The Dark Knight, which he also showed me (after two hours I did a George C. Scott Hardcore.)

HEDDA GABLER was pretty awful. Mary Louise was also rotten in SNOW GEESE.

Adam Rapp owns this thread.

R322, everyone in the audience realized that It was not passion but mental illness.

Here's a pretentious interview with mary Louise Parker justifying her terrible acting "choices" and ragging on the critics who told her that her choices stank. with clips from the terrible production of HEDDA GABLER. Count your blessings that you missed this turkey.

R291, R302 - promo clip from Bernadette.

I can't even remember the name of the worst one I've seen. It was a jukebox musical of 80s music put on by a youth theater group. I think it may have been a musical created specifically for young people because the dialogue was some of the weakest crap I've ever heard.

When it comes to Broadway, I'd say Wicked. I really hate that show.

Thank you, R334. That was hysterical.

R291 here. Thanks, R334! Oh my god, it brought it all back. Jesus Christ. Those girls were so vile. The choreographer had just graduated from some Podunk small arts academy up north - I remember in her bio she said Bernadette was the greatest musical since West Side Story. You can see in the video what the dancing was like.

And at the end, the cast was walking upstage holding enormous (lit) altar candles in silhouette. They looked like they had these enormous erections. Then at the last moment, they all walk downstage and hold their candles up -- and then the ORCHESTRA MUSICIANS stood up too and they were all holding lit candles and trying to play one-handed. Honest to god, I'm not exaggerating.

Glenda Jackson's "Hedda Gabler" was so bad that Time Magazine's review headlined "Turkey Gabler."

Around the same time, I saw a remake of "Sugar" at the LACLO. It starred wonderful Robert Morse but the headliner was Joe Namath, probably because of his pantyhose commercial. Sugar was played by the wife of the director and her claim to fame was she was the understudy to Pamela Blair in the LA Company of A Chorus Line. The night I saw it, there were nine people in the 3,500 seat Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Oh dear God, why isn't Bernadette being revived immediately?!? Ack! I must see that moment with the orchestra or my life will not be complete.

I actually saw Pam Blair do Sugar on Broadway.

She was Elaine Joyce's understudy.

I was just a kid and went backstage after the performance to get everybody's autograph.

I mean literally backstage. Back then you could just walk into that alley and walk through the stage door.

Blair was super sweet and though I was a gayling I was smitten.

I was happy she had a success with Chorus Line.

Speaking of Pam Blair, I saw her in her first starring role on Broadway after her Chorus Line success, King of Hearts, a show that was too boring and forgettable to truly rate on this thread.

As a kid I started seeing al the classic Broadway musicals of the mid-60s: Baker Street, Golden Boy, Dolly, Funny Girl, Fiddler, Oliver, Hallelujah, Baby!, On a Clear Day, I Do! I Do!, etc.

Illya, Darling was the first musical I saw that made me realize they weren't all wonderful. In fact, it was horrible, even with star Melina Mercouri, who I found rather grotesque.

I loved KING OF HEARTS! I saw a terrible revisal of it at Goodspeed a few years back with a horrible cast.

OMG, I forgot about "The Chairs"

I think I blocked it out

R342 The Kritzerland cd release of the obc is very enjoyable. I wish I had seen it.

I love the movie.

I loved that production of The Chairs.

Sorry but Fun Home was boring as hell, the score SUCKS, and I would have left if I was alone.

In 1976, I begged my parents to take me to see WEST SIDE STORY which was playing here in Chicago. It was laughingly bad. A WAY too old Leslie Uggams was playing Maria and I couldn't tell you who played the other roles. What I also remember is that the guy playing Tony was singing his songs like a bad lounge singer (*finger snapping* 'Could be...who knows.') This production is so bad that Ms. Uggams never lists it in any of her bios.

Both Fun Home and Caroline or Change are true stinkers. Common denominator? Tesnori.

Both Fun Home and Caroline or Change are brilliant. Common denominator? Tesnori. (sic)

Must be why her work appears on this worst play/musical list.

I was in the one and only production of 'The Phantom of the Opry', a country music twist on you know what with a jukebox classic country score. The whole thing was written by Lloyd Schwartz (son of Sherwood). We rehearsed it as a tongue in cheek spoof and it clicked pretty well until Lloyd showed up the last week of rehearsals and announced it was 'a goddamn serious drama' and that it had to be played straight. Let us say that was not a wise choice. How do you keep a straight face when you're caught in the phantom's lair singing 'Please Release Me' in four part harmony?

^ Oh Lord Jesus. LMAO

R349 LOVED Fun Home.and Brilliant..DESPISED every minute -beat of CAROLINE or FUCKING CHANGE as it was a god awfully bad shout fest!

CAROLINE or FUCKING CHANGE scream-a-thon also shredded Tonya Pinkins vocal cords.

Your theater threads are always some of the wittiest stuff on the DL. They take me back to when I lived in the city, saw everything and had an ass that was closer to my hips than my knees.

Pippin on Broadway in 2013. It was horrible and never-ending. I was bored out of my mind. My friend and I both turned to each other and said, "This is terrible!" I don't understand all the raves and awards. And I usually love everything I see. I even liked Spider-Man and The Wedding Singer but I couldn't take Pippin.

But Pippin was terrible even in '72.

When was it not dreadful?

It just had that dazzling Fosse staging which was the whole point.

To see it without that would be ridiculous.

DISASTER. Directed by an amateur, with only half the 70's pop songs well known, full of names that haven't worked in a while, with sets that are dinner theatre at best. I get the whole, "it's a piss take on disaster films", but it simply isn't clever enough to pull it off. I actually think it is just an excuse for a shit-house show when people respond with "oh, you really do need to know the disaster movie genre". Wow, what a niche audience they are pitching this to. Paid $30 for a ticket, and still felt ripped off. I can't imagine what poor tourists feel when they pay $120 a ticket to this mess.

[quote]Didn't he write a whole passel of awful gay plays?

If he used the word passel, then yes!

"The Fantasticks" with Robert Goulet at the Shubert Theater in Philadelphia in 1990. I was ready to leave at intermission, but my friends wouldn't let me. They said we all had to suffer together.

R360, what's wrong with "passel"? You made me doubt that I had used it correctly, but it's fine.

I walked out of The Act with Liza and They're Playing Our Song with Arnez and Robert Klein.

I stayed to the beginning of the second act for both and when I saw they weren't going to get better I bailed.

And I actually made it through all of Into the Light. And now I wonder how. Though it could be because when I was a boy Dean Jones in those Disney movies was a huge crush and I loved him on the obc of Company.

What was that musical about Joseph McCarthy?

Senator Joe.

Senator Joe Act I Finale. It's all about Senator Joe McCarthy and his bout with alcoholism and women.

This article lists a bunch of Broadway stinkers.

Did anyone see the immortal Rachel Lily Rosenbloom? I forgot who said it, but one of the creators saw Sondheim walking in and begged him not to see it. He said something like, don't worry, everyone says it's hilariously bad and I want to see it.

That Senator Joe song is jaw-dropping. In a weird way, I almost like it. I just can't imagine any musical that might contain it.

I heard that Sondheim was doing that at the door to all the audience members at Passion.

To which all the theater queens responded we wouldn't miss this for the world.

If Sondheim is doing that he's fucking rude.

I was working at the Broadhurst when the Sondheim/Furth "Thriller" Getting Away With Murder played for it's 16 performances. People were racing for the exits.

So many in the last 35 years, who can single out the exquisitely awful. I mostly end up hating popular musicals that actually run, yet bored me to DEATH. I'd say "Starlight Express" takes that crown with "Les Miz", and "Wicked" hot on its heels. Three shows I thought would NEVER END. I am still bored.

I did see "Roza", "Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public", "The First", "Rock and Roll, the First 5000 Years", "Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Reallt Reflect Up?", "Nick & Nora", "Passion", "Merrily We Roll Along", and countless other real duds.

"Christmas With the Crawfords" back around 2003-4-ish. Joey Arias apparently had taken a bath in Coco Chanel and I actually stopped breathing for the first few seconds he hit the stage because the stink sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

When we got back home, all our clothes stunk of Coco Chanel.

Tuck Everlasting and Disaster on the same day...

Critic's pick TUCK EVERLASTING. Hated it. That's all.

A hot dominican banker took me on a date to see Les Mis. We were both misérables after 20 minutes and split. He was fucking me to high heaven probably before the entr'acte.

That clip of Bernadette that R334 posted features a very young Martine McCutcheon. She's the one with the second solo in the beginning-she has on a black sweatshirt and white sneakers. Who the fuck was the young male lead? He was HAWT.

P.S. Martine McCutcheon went on to the BBC soap EastEnders, Love Actually and My Fair Lady (Cameron Mackintosh fired her for unprofessional behavior).

r343 I agree. On Broadway I loved it. Took the trek to Godspeed and what I saw was a ghastly "revisal" Everything - cast, direction, choreography, sets, costumes, new songs, script revisions - was abysmal. I think the director, whoever the hack was, split before they opened.

[quote][R250] Poor Kathleen Turner has certainly been in her share of awful plays. I saw her in HIGH, where she played a tough-as-nails nun who got to wrestle with a naked Evan Jonigkeit while was trying to attack her. Sadly, even the nudity couldn't save this show, it lasted 7 performances.

HIGH, ugh. What a turgid, melodramatic potboiler. I saw it in out of town try-outs, [R256]. At least DL favorite Michael Berresse was in it, though he left before it hit Broadway. I had heard Matthew Lombardo (who also wrote that huge smash LOOPED) was doing rewrites, so I accepted a comp when it was at the Booth. It was worse. All the best lines, such as they were, had been appropriated by Ms Turner, who, at least, seemed to have sobered up for Broadway.

How does Lombardo get his backing with such crap writing?

R380 why would anyone travel to GOdspeed to see a show in CT?

r380 you are right. I should have known better. Everything I've seen at Goodspeed has been shit. Its only rival is Paper Mill Playhouse.

Well I guess it's a very long time ago now but Goodspeed used to be known for great stuff.

[quote] [R380] why would anyone travel to Goodspeed to see a show in CT?

I went to Goodspeed in 2004 to see CALL ME MADAM, starring Kim Criswell. It's was a hopelessly dated show with a good score. I'm glad I went from an historic perspective, but I've never rushed back to see any of their other shows. From NY it's really a schlep.

How does a costume like that in r385 make it through costume fittings and dress rehearsals, much less previews and a photo call? Did NO ONE in the theater say, "Hey, that dress would be so much more flattering on our leading lady without the curtain swag making her huge bust look even more ginormous!"???

I know Matthew Lombardo a bit. Total hot mess. Very important person, just ask him.

Didn't Matt "Retardo" Lombardo write all those bomb plays in a row?

[quote]what's wrong with "passel"? You made me doubt that I had used it correctly, but it's fine.

No, it's not fine. It's like plethora: It's a word people who are not good with words use to awkwardly create the impression they are well educated.

Besides, it makes you sound like Melanie in Gone with the Wind.

You are the one is insufferable and pretentious R389. Where I come from, those were fifth or sixth grade vocabulary words that average people used to use. You must be from the South, where any word with three syllables is morally suspect.

Fuck you R389. I'm a college graduate, and I used the word "passel" correctly. I'm sorry it offended your delicate sensibilities, but perhaps a passel of dildos up your tight ass will help you to relax.

[quote]perhaps a passel of dildos up your tight ass will help you to relax

Now THAT'S how that word is supposed to be used!

R391 He's not complaining that you used it wrong, he's complaining that you used the word at all.

[quote]I know Matthew Lombardo a bit. Total hot mess. Very important person, just ask him.

No kidding. Check out his FB page. Yesterday he posted a photo of his face in a gelatin mask, looking like he was a bukkake recipient. He's posted photos of his plastic surgeries, and the aftermath of the removal of an ingrown hair on his crotch. Lots of puppy/daddy talk and bragging about his big dick.

He's proud of his meth addict in recovery status, but warns people that if things don't go his way, he could relapse.

When HIGH posted its closing notice right after opening around Easter, he compared himself to Christ and his resurrection (he's also a rabid Catholic).

It generally doesn't take much to entertain me. Only one theatre experience was so bad that I felt that my time had been poorly spent--watching GIANT while it played in Dallas. While it had its high points--"Jump" and "He Wanted a Girl"--the musical tried to cover too much ground. Jett Rink's arc was rushed and he was made almost unnecessary. It was a disappointment.

Encores' Do I Hear a Waltz.

No wonder Rodgers loathed Sondheim and Laurents.

If I had to deal with those two cynical narcissistic arrogant queens I would have as well.

Dorothy Rodgers was right. Their work really was shit.

"Legends!" I may be the only one who saw Mary Martin on a fairly good day. So the far worst version: Collins and Evans.

Wow R396 If Encores! production of WALTZ is the worst thing you've seen you've led a charmed existence. I saw the matinee today and enjoyed it very much.

[quote] No wonder Rodgers loathed Sondheim and Laurents

At the talkback it was mentioned that Rodgers was of two different minds regarding Sondheim. Rodgers actually wrote him a long congratulatory letter after having seen COMPANY, praising his work. Rodgers had known Sondheim since he was a kid of 12. The story was related that Rodgers felt that Sondheim had been a charming little boy who had now grown into "a monster", which of course got a big laugh.

But by 1965, Richard Rodgers was a sad old drunk, who according to Arthur Laurents, was reduced to hiding a vodka bottle in the toilet tank, and excusing himself regularly during meetings to have a snort.

IMHO, Alex Wong had the SECOND best ass in the show, the first belonging to Devin Roberts, with Claybourne Elder coming in a close third.

Well considering that Rodgers' work was the absolute best contribution to this show if I had been working with the arrogant Laurents whose work after Gypsy is total dreck and Sondheim who was following the playwright like a puppy I would have been drunk all the time as well.

I'm sure the two of them were totally insufferable which one can tell from seeing this dreadful show.

It really does come across so much better on the obc which someone once said plays like a hit.

Although uneven much of the music is terrific. The problem is that halfway through Rodgers seems to have lost interest because he was writing a musical version of Summertime and the other two weren't.

I was watching the show in total disbelief how such an unpleasant first act can turn into such a nasty second.

Leona is such a neurotic rude desperate unpleasant person in the first act and then turns into a mean drunk in the second.

What in the world did people expect of Elizabeth Allen? As the sympathetic lead character of a musical the role is unplayable.

Read Rodgers version of events in his autbio. Everything he says rings true.

It makes me want to laugh when I read Laurents and Sondheim say that the problem was Rodgers.

And all that bullshit about Italians being so free spirited and loving life, living for the moment and lacking hypocrisy.

Clearly Laurents never knew any Italians well.

He only knew them as a tourist.

Lucky him!

By the way despite how much I disliked it DL's beloved Karen Ziemba is truly sensational. I was dreading her putting on an Italian accent with a trowel.

She is wonderful as a funny sexy older woman who has seen everything. A terrific old style Broadway performance.

Errico spares nothing and plays Leona full out which I found brave.

And Elder is gorgeous.

Anyone else see Fran Drescher in Some Girls? God that was horrible.

[quote] Errico spares nothing and plays Leona full out which I found brave.

At the talkback, Errico related the one note that Sondheim gave her after the dress rehearsal. He told her to pick one line during her tirade at the party and utter it with such venom that the audience instantly hates her. She chose the line 'What happened to the music?', as if to say 'I heard my waltz, what happened to my waltz?'

[quote]...utter it with such venom that the audience instantly hates her.

Oh, like Melissa needs help in that department.

So why must Leona be so despicable and hateful and DeRossi turn out to be such a jerk?

You want a bitter sweet romance in Venice not the venetian vacation from hell.

Rodgers should have called David Lean in desperation and begged him to fly in from location shooting on Zhivago to fix the show.

R398 At least Alex as Miss Saigon next season!

What's hottie Patrick Ortiz doing now?

Ohmygawd, he's gorgeous.

[quote]42nd Street was boring and dated.

Really? 42nd Street was "dated?" Now, there's an intelligent comment....

I remember when I saw No No Nanette in '71.

I thought the composer and lyricist had been living under a rock for 45 years.

Did anyone see the Frankenstein show that closed after one performance on Broadway in the late seventies? John Carradine was in it, and it was supposed to be an absolute disaster.

Fame: The Musical. Horrible.

Dee Snider's Christmas show. Taylor Dayne hit rock bottom (although she still sounds great).

Waltz of the Stork by Melvin & Mario Van Peebles

Endocrine

I haven't seen many, but I was dragged to see a road company production of The Wiz in 1978, along with the rest of my 8th grade class. I hated it, didn't like the music at all. I saw the recent tv production and enjoyed it a lot, it has a good score. I guess road company productions are just generally lame.

I don't remember the name. It was a play about a Chinese waiter who hated working in his family's restaurant. It was in a theater in Silver Spring MD. It was just awful. The friend I saw it with and I still, when judging anything, will go "Chinese waiter play bad?" if something is awful.

'Night Mother with Edie Falco and Brenda Blethyn. Has that one been discussed?

I don't think I could endure that awful play in any production but that revival with those two totally miscast women as mother and daughter, miserably directed by Michael Mayer, was unbearable. And no intermission, so stuck in our seats for the entire lousy two hours.

Legends with Joan Collins and Linda Evans

Orpheus Descending at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada

Wicked

Avenue Q

Rent - so boring and poorly done - and pointless.

A strident feminist reconfiguration of Medea at a university drama department in the fall of 2017. No intermission. 2+ hours. If they had cut maybe 40 minutes, it might have worked.

[quote] Rent - so boring and poorly done - and pointless.

I was a teenager in the 1990s and even then I had more interest in [italic]La Boheme[/italic]. A modern take on that that works as drama or as a musical has to do it much better than that. It pales in comparison not only to Puccini, but to the great American songbook that used to comprise much of the Broadway and Hollywood musicals we love. "Seasons of Love" is no "Over the Rainbow" and it in no way takes the place of this:

Bump

I love bad musicals . I would rather see bad than mediocre any day. Lestat was the worst thing I ever saw on Broadway, and I saw Carrie, which was fun. During Lestat there was a Sound effect of someone saying “wolf killer” that was supposed to be ominous, but the audience howled with laughter every time they played it. Honorable mention: Lord of the Rings- dreadful. (London) Bat out of Hell- bad, but good bad .(London) Adam’s Family - bad, but not good bad (Chicago)

Bye Bye Birdie

We left at intermission!

Four of us!

Thank hell I didn’t pay for those tickets!