Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb (27 page)
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Authors: Arthur Bicknell
My old pal Leo Shull printed a lively little feature in his March 7 edition of
Show Business
, which he labeled “‘Moose Murders’ is murdered—Investors Are, Too.” In it, he offered the information many folks were clamoring for . . . exactly how much fucking money had been dumped into this bad boy. According to Leo (and I have no real way of verifying this—or, let me be more honest, I have no desire whatsoever to fact check this particular issue) Force Ten Productions, Inc. pitched in $376,000 plus another $112,000 from Corbin Robertson (Lillie’s brother), and the General Partners (all from Houston) put in $112,000 for a total investment of $600,000.
Just a drop in the bucket by today’s standards, of course, but practically unheard of in those days.
And all of it straight down the
terlet
.
So maybe it was all just the sluggish economy that was to blame for Moose Murders’ cataclysmic failure. After all, not
everybody
had hated it. Pia Lindstrom had been too confused to offer an opinion, and here’s what our friend Liz Smith wrote in the
Daily News
a few days after the closing:
“Say what you will, I feel honored to be one of the elitists who saw ‘Moose Murders.’ What’s more, I had a very good time at the opening night of this farce. It received just about the worst reviews in theater history. Well, as far as I was concerned it wasn’t boring for a minute and that’s more than I can say for half of the elevated plays I’ve seen this season.”
These were the
only
kind words about the show I saw in print. And, as I mentioned way back at the beginning of this tale, the play stuck in the critics’ cumulative craw for weeks after its demise. “The only good thing about ‘Goodnight, Grandpa’ wrote Michael Feingold of the
Village Voice
, “is that it was better in both execution and intention than ‘Moose Murders.’” (I always wondered how Feingold had found out about my “intentions.” Perhaps they’d slipped out at the party at Sardi’s, which he attended as a guest of two of my friends. Jane had run into him in the buffet line, and, without identifying herself, asked if he’d spoken to our mutual acquaintances about the show. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been consciously avoiding them” she reported him as saying. “They’re friends with the playwright.”)
Arthur Bell, also of the
Voice
, complained about Frank Rich’s dismissal of ‘
On Your Toes
,’ by suggesting the critic “must have eaten a rancid portion of the ‘Moose Murders’ set before seeing the show.” William Raidy of the
Star Ledger
assured his readers that top Broadway producers promised “a light at the end of the tunnel despite the proliferation of ‘trash plays’ such as ‘Moose Murders.’” (This, from the same man who, in reference to
My Great Dead Sister
, had written about me three years earlier: “The author has eloquence in dealing with his decidedly off-beat characters that reminds me somewhat of Carson McCullers (mixed with today’s Albert Innaurato’s sense of ‘family’).” I suspect he never made the connection. Maybe if I’d called this latest opus
The Moose Is a Lonely Hunter
, or something…
So, what’s your genre, there, Arthur?
Trash. Trash Plays. Thanks for asking.
A week or so after closing, we visited the Dakota to pick up some stained glass sculptures with the Moose logo a local artist had created for us. John and Ricka seemed a bit shell-shocked, but were both plugging along. Ricka had learned from the press office that the New York City Theatre Criticism Trifecta (Rich, Barnes, and Watt) had allegedly conferred with one another before their reviews were published. They’d all hated Anthony Shaffer’s
Whodunnit
, a play that had opened in December and was still running despite some very mixed reviews. True to Holland’s suspicions, perhaps they were convinced that a large factor contributing to the extended run of this “putative comic thriller” had been the producers’ use of excerpted quotes that had been annoyingly misconstrued by the public as complimentary. “Stuck in a no-win situation,” Rich had originally written, “the good actors trapped in this room generally acquit themselves as honorably as possible.”
This statement had been honed to something like “good actors!” for the show’s advertising campaign.
The triumvirate apparently wanted to make sure the same advantage would not be available to the producers of
Moose Murders
.
We suggested getting together for a post mortem dinner, but John had already booked himself and Lillie on the next morning’s Concorde for a quick restorative jaunt to Paris.
Such are the postdisaster compensatory options for the very rich.
If only he’d waited a month or so, I might very well have been the poor schmuck booking his flight. Crawling back to Air France to resume my day job was one of my own best options, and I gladly took it.
If I were writing the screenplay of these misadventures, I’d end it here, with a panoramic shot of me in a trench coat waving a tearless goodbye from the gate as John and Lillie disappear into the fog at Mach 2.
My last visit to the Dakota came a few weeks later, when I handed in a screenplay John had commissioned me to write. I always suspected this was a bit of a charitable gesture on his part, but considering everything else I’d been forced to swallow these past several weeks, it was easy enough to throw a good chunk of my pride into the stew. And I had rent to pay. I’d get over it.
All traces of the Moose had been removed from his office by then. In their places were posters of two subsequent Broadway projects, both of which had been taken on in the nick of time before the deadline for the 1983 Tony Awards.
The first, a drama starring Richard Dreyfus called
Total Abandon
that dealt with the rape of a small child—always an audience magnet—was received almost as miserably as had been
Moose Murders
—and, like its predecessor, closed after just one performance.
The second, Peter Nichol’s
Passion
, garnered mixed reviews and raves for its star Frank Langella and managed to stay open, thereby escaping the one-night-only curse. It opened right under the wire—before the cutoff day for the Tonys—and captured a nomination for its supporting actress, Roxanne Hart.
I’d be lying if I claimed that Dennis and I felt no resentment as John struggled to buy back his name. Both
Total Abandon
and
Passion
listed “John Roach” as a contributing producer, not Force Ten. If only it had been as easy for the two of us to find public absolution. Well. I say that now but the truth is I don’t believe I was feeling as devastated as I probably should have been. I don’t know if you ever really dare to indulge yourself in either the fantasy of total success or total failure during such theatrical joy rides. Neither one of those extreme situations is real; most outcomes fall into the murky gray middle ground. I can’t be sure, but I suspect Abject Failure was as surreal to me as Overnight Success must have been to some of my fellow playwrights, all of whom—at least in
this
narrative—will remain nameless.
In April, just before the Tony awards, Frank Rich wrote an article in the
Sunday Times
about “classic flops.” My dead baby was his focal point. Of all the programs he’d collected from the past decade, he claimed, he’d keep only the one from
Moose Murders
. He went on to suggest how much fun it would be in ten years to see how all those involved with the project had gotten on with their lives.
Both Holland and Nick went straight back to the plays they’d left, to take on the Moose—Holland to Off-Broadway’s
Breakfast with Les and Bess
and Nick to
The Dining Room
—which ended up playing until mid-July. We took in the show around this time and had a reunion lunch with Nick. For whatever reasons, this was the first time we were really able to get to know one another. I guess we were old war buddies, now. We talked a bit about another upcoming
Moose Murders
mention—this time in the form of a fourteen-page article for
Esquire
written by our own June Gable. It was scheduled, Nick had learned, for the magazine’s September issue. He said June had phoned him to forewarn him and to assure him that he himself wouldn’t be trashed.
I had to ask who
would
be trashed, of course.
“She zaps it to Ricka and John,” revealed Nick. “She refers to me as a ‘victim,’ calls Lisa ‘the tall one,’ and apparently comes out smelling like a rose herself.”
That was quite an understatement I learned sometime in August when I picked up my own copy of “How I Survived Moose Murders, the Biggest Broadway Bomb,” by June Gable. According to June’s revisionist theories, John and Ricka had clearly bound and gagged “Love Lump” (a term of endearment June claimed her agent used on her when presenting her with good news—like being cast as the Old Lady in
Candide
and being offered a lead in
Moose Murders
) and forced her to do these unnatural acts on a public stage against her will. Despite this mental and physical abuse (again according to her article), she’d remained the sweetheart of the set, feeding E.T. lollypops to the little girl to dry her tears, and helping the old lady through her bouts of paranoid dementia. “I turned toward Eve,” wrote June, “who looked utterly exhausted. She barely made it out for bows. I touched her cheek, but she just stared straight ahead. I knew I’d never see her in
Moose Murders
again.”
Marc and I read this together, giggling like school girls. “I turned toward Eve,” we interpolated. “I touched her cheek, drew her impossibly close, and kissed her dry, blistered, open lips, exploring her wisecracking mouth with my barbed and hungry tongue. But she just stared straight ahead.
“‘Line?’ she gasped, then died in my arms.”
Listen, I think June was smart to grab a buck where she could. I myself never quite found a way to capitalize on any of this crap. I
was
approached by somebody claiming to represent both Sandra Bernhard and Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens. Seems these two were interested in teaming up to coproduce a musical version of
Moose Murders
. Like everybody else, they’d been intrigued by the unbelievably lousy reviews. Their whole concept, in fact, seemed to hinge on a collection of gigantic billboards with excerpts from all of the most quotably egregious critical beratement (John Simon’s “as close as I ever have to get to the bottomless pit,” for example). They even had a working title:
Moose Murders, the Afterbirth
.
But I turned them down. Probably a stupid move on my part, but I just wasn’t into the whole cult thing; I was still seeing myself as a serious
playwright of promise
.
Liz Smith tried to help me gather some postproduction momentum. She wrote another column suggesting that some smart producer should capitalize on the thousands of people kicking themselves for not attending
Moose Murders
.
Guess all the smart producers out there missed this advice.
The only inquiry regarding foreign rights to the play came from an agency in Istanbul.
That’s right. Turkey—and
only
Turkey—wanted the rights to my show. Does it get any better than that?
In 1994, eleven years after the curtain came down on the first and last performance of
Moose Murders
, Frank Rich, leaving his position as chief theater critic of the
New York Times
to become an op-ed columnist, wrote a retrospective essay for the
Sunday Magazine
about his thirteen-year stint as “the Butcher of Broadway.” Along with his reminiscences of great plays the likes of
Angels in America, Noises Off
, and the
Heidi Chronicles
, came this:
Broadway was not all “Amadeus” and “Dreamgirls.” At a time when production costs were still low enough for first-time producers to indulge their most catastrophic theatrical whims, covering the theater was as madcap as going to the circus. It became a running gag with me and Wendy Wasserstein, who would accompany me to anything, that many of the biggest bombs on Broadway had titles beginning with the letter M . . . .
“Moose Murders” was a special case. It is the worst play I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage. A murder mystery set in a hunting lodge in the Adirondacks, it reached its climax when a mummified quadriplegic abruptly bolted out of his wheelchair to kick an intruder, dressed in a moose costume, in the groin.
Wendy and I saw “Moose Murders” at a Wednesday matinee. Hardly had the play started when the smell of vomit wafted through the orchestra at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. Gradually, those seated in the first few rows starting taking refuge in empty seats at the back of the house, until finally we and the apparent source of the exodus, a voluminous man third-row center, were virtually the only members of the audience in the front rows. Yet I feared that if we moved back, I might be too far away to give the play a fair shake.
Finally, my sense of justice gave way. I bolted to the back of the theater, where the press agent and other staff members of the production inevitably hang out at critics’ performances, to seek a solution. To my amazement, however, there was no one in the back of the house; this sinking ship had already been abandoned. I retrieved Wendy, and we moved to the back row, where we watched the unfolding horror with no less amazement than we had from close up. “Moose Murders” closed on opening night, but its gallant cast members still list the credit in their Playbill biographies, usually preceded by the word “legendary.” (Frank Rich. “After 13 years of drama and farce. . . EXIT THE CRITIC. . . humming the music and settling the scores.”
New York Times Magazine
. February 13, 1994.)
