Read Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb Online
Authors: Arthur Bicknell
Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb
Thanks to all those who trod
the slippery boards of the Eugene O’Neill
with me thirty years ago.
Even more thanks to all the remarkable friends
and family members who have taken such good care
of me in the aftermath. And the greatest thanks
of all to the
Moose Murdered
production team
(Marsha Cohen, Laura Shelley, and
Barbara Koppelman), to my agent, Janet Rosen,
my revivalist, John Borek,
and especially to my editor
and “significant otter,” Rachel Hockett.
Group Moose Hug!
Copyright © 2011 by Arthur Bicknell
Bullet hole image: title page, pp 101, 102, 105, front cover, back cover Shutterstock, Copyright: rangizzz
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63003-005-6
| This one’s for me. |
Contents
Prologue: Moose, Now and Forever
Chapter Two: May the Force Be with You
Chapter Three: The Call of the Wild
Chapter Five: A Receiving Line
Chapter Eight: Miss Holland’s Opus
Chapter Nine: An Open and Shut Case
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I was sent to the principal’s office for writing my first play.
It was a two-page allegory called
The Train Ride to Hell
, and was narrated by the devil, who, despite using words like “damn” and “penis,” actually turned out to be the hero of the piece. I don’t think the concept of the
antihero
was around in those days—not in the fifth grade, anyway—and besides, the teacher who found this opus stuffed in the back of my desk already had it in for me, for talking and—worse,
giggling
— during a group sing-along of “The Star Spangled Banner” some weeks earlier. The way she saw it, I’d already shown noisy disrespect for my country, and now here I was eulogizing Satan, for the love of God.
It was 1962 and even in the relatively progressive upstate New York public school system this kind of blasphemy was severely frowned on. It was obvious to my teacher that steps had to be taken—and fast.
The sad truth was that I was too big a wimp to be an effective rabble-rouser, and normally tried as hard as I could to follow all the rules. And it didn’t matter who set down those rules, either. If something even
sounded
like a rule, no matter where it came from, you could count on me to do my very best not to break it. So this long walk down the hall to Mrs. Gelder’s office was truly devastating, and I was shaking and sobbing uncontrollably by the time I got there.
Luckily, Principal Gelder knew exactly how I could make amends.
“Here’s an idea. Why don’t you write about God?” she said.
Grateful to be offered such an easy solution, I did exactly as she told me and handed in a new play—
The Train Ride to Heaven
—the very next morning. Not only was Mrs. Gelder appeased, but she proudly read my revision over the school’s public address system. Before long, all the kids were submitting their own works to be read on the air, and Mrs. Gelder rewarded me by letting me host a new daily broadcast of cheerfully reverent student compositions.
At the tender age of eleven, I now knew all I’d ever have to know about the Game of Redemption.
But the real test of this knowledge didn’t come along until twenty-one years later, when another one of my plays, receiving the worst reviews one could possibly imagine, opened and closed on Broadway on the same disastrous night.
A play I called
Moose Murders
.
Not even Mrs. Gelder could bail me out this time.
At first I decided the best laid plan for Moose
and
man would be to take it all on the chin and to remain unflappable for as long as it took to become unfloppable. I suspect I was still acting on that piece of advice from Mrs. Gelder—“write about God”—when I became determined to follow-up with some immaculate, relevant, and
non-farcical
drama which I’d write, naturally, under an assumed name (since my own was no longer of any use to anyone). Everything else would fall into place after that. Eventually I would nab the Tony nomination and the win, deliver a few deceptively eloquent words to my fellow “classmates,” and then—just before the orchestra drowned me out—renounce my alias and reveal my antlers for the world to see.
“Hello, suckers! My name is Arthur, and I wrote
Moose Murders
.”
Cue the falling chandelier.
Yeah, I was the Phantom; that’s the best way I can describe my self-image during that fallout period right after the Moose detonated. I might be disfigured and scorned, sure, but I was at least willing to hole up in the bowels of the Paris Opera House (okay, a tiny apartment on Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street, but you get where I’m going with this) until coming up with some masterpiece so universally acceptable that I’d be able to peel off the porcelain mask, climb out of the shadows, and once again walk among theatergoers and critics alike. Plays come and go, I told myself, and even one this monumentally awful would eventually be forgotten.
I clung to that conviction for a very long time.
Months.
Years, even.
Eventually I stopped trying to “write about God,” and embraced my inalienable right to relative obscurity. I’m happy to report that I’ve since reclaimed the use of my name and seldom feel the need any more to role-play as the Phantom of the opera.
That bad play of mine, however, went careening off in another direction beyond my control—or anybody else’s. After a quarter of a century it’s clear that the Moose has far outdistanced the man. It is legend. And it is that very phenomenon—the unwillingness of
Moose Murders
just to lie down and die the way it was supposed to—that many theater enthusiasts (including me) are still trying to figure out.
The element of
Moose Murders
I’d always been most confident about was its title. I thought it was memorable and silly and would have real staying power.
Got
that
right, at least.
While the effrontery of its opening-slash-closing night was still fresh in the minds of the estimated 1,150 witnesses to what the
New York Times
referred to as “one of the most magically dreadful nights in New York stage history,” it wasn’t surprising to see critics conjure up its name to ward off other artistically challenged productions following immediately in its wake. But the comparisons kept on coming year after year, and, to this day,
Moose Murders
stubbornly refuses to relinquish its status as
the
iconic Broadway disaster:
“Only the absence of antlers,” wrote
New York Times
critic Frank Rich in 1988, “separates the pig murders of
Carrie
from the
Moose Murders
of Broadway lore.” (Rich, in fact, has continued his love/hate affair with the Moose throughout his stint at the
Times
and beyond, every so often reaffirming the fact that it remained the worst play he’d ever seen, but that it did “remind one, however backhandedly, of the particular excitement of witnessing live theater.”)
In November 2003, Michael Riedel of the
New York Post
reported that the production staff of the Farrah Fawcett vehicle
Bobbi Boland
“invoked two words to convince producer Joyce Johnson to close her show in previews: ‘Moose Murders.’”
Again in the
Post
the following year, Clive Barnes proclaimed in his review of
Prymate
: “There have been worse plays on Broadway—
Moose Murders
comes to mind, and something about 35 years ago called
Fire
. Or perhaps it was
Fever
. Whatever.”
The restless Moose hasn’t confined itself to the theater. Throughout the years, misguided efforts in just about every branch of the performing arts have fallen prey to its legacy of ineptitude. In a 1989 classical music review for the
Washington Times
, after calling Kiri Te Kanawa’s operatic treatment of
West Side Story
on Deutsche Grammophon “the decade’s best unintentional comedy album,” Octavio Roca went on to define
Utamaro
(the title of the Kennedy Center’s production of Japan’s first Broadway-style musical) as “Japanese for
Moose Murders
.”