Posted
8:50 PM
by Gene
INDESCRIBABLE TRAGEDY IN BRANSON EAST: As expected,
The Greatest Musical of All Time is closing -- nine years before
The Paper of Re-CORD predicted it would. ASSPress is
spinning it as a triumph, but face it,
without The Boys it hardly ever drew standing room, and the "
hoary" jokes grew hoarier and hoarier -- even
the show's greatest publicist Mr. Heilpern admitted how the dense Japanese tourists didn't laugh at the swishy gay jokes. We suspect
the film-version bomb didn't sell many seats. Now, having earned a probably inflated "$1 billion" for the likes of
CHEAP CHANNEL (whose name is amazingly missing from the list of backers -- well all right, it's called "Live Nation"),
The Greatest Musical can join
The Black Crook as a "huge" hit that became a worthless historical relic.
Thankfully
a musical sitcom will be replacing this particular theme park, and will probably also run six years, but we would not be surprised if the Branson East "critical" community is slightly more on guard this time. Then again we would not be surprised if it isn't.
P. S. In other
movie news,
Rog says another Branson East theme park is going up, based on a certain Margaret Mitchell novel. "'Gone with the Wind' has somehow avoided being turned into a musical all these many years", he confidently exults, not knowing
someone else already did it -- for the Japanese. It never left Japan.
CORRECTION on 3/18/2007 at 6:40 p.m.: The show, called
Scarlett, and written by
Harold Rome,
played in London in 1972 and Los Angeles in 1973, but didn't do well in either town.