Must Close Saturday: Book Review

“Must close Saturday” is a revealing and frequently hilarious exploration of the British musical flop. Ranging from the undervalued to the truly awful, Adrian Wright’s book functions as a celebration, recrimination, and thoughtful look at the history of those British musicals whose failures have defined the successes.

Dividing shows into easily digestible chunks, Wright details the good the bad and the ugly, and the intriguing stories behind them. The book is largely comprehensive- although an update in a few years would be much appreciated- and with an excellent appendix of shows’ casts and numbers is useful both to a casual and scholarly student of musicals. Indeed the depth of Wright’s investigation into the stories behind these flops means that the book could almost be titled ‘How not to write a musical’, even if one of the key answers to this would seem to be ‘Don’t work with Leslie Bricusse or write about industrial disputes’.

Wright’s book turns up no conclusive answers as to what makes a flop, although themes emerge throughout: terrible subject matters, terrible scores, terrible acting, and most importantly terrible reviews. These are some of the highlights of the book, with the scorn and wit of the British press celebrated as much as the shows: who could fail to enjoy a book which highlights reviews that contain sentences like ‘this farrago, this omnifutile, pastesward and plastic bladder of blather’. 

However, elsewhere the reasons for flopping seem almost incomprehensible- take for instance “I Can’t Sing” which despite memorable songs and a strong creative team only managed 53 performances- or reflect changing British tastes to the detriment of the shows. Wright’s own bias does come into play at certain points when detailing these, especially when writing about the recent musical of ‘The Go-Between’, adapted from a book by LP Hartley about whom Wright has written a book himself. However, what does emerge is a belief and hope in the future of the British musical, and an appreciation for its capacity to be creative and push boundaries in spite of commercial failure.

A more powerful theme in the latter half of the book is a decline in the ability of British musicals to “flop” at all. From the 1990s onwards theatres appear to take fewer risks due to higher ticket prices and the overwhelming dominance of revivals and the “big” shows such as Les Miserables, whose constant running pushes smaller musicals out of the game. Wright powerfully conveys a sense of loss here: the loss of the British musical to push, and be allowed to fail, without destroying people’s livelihoods. Of course pursuing these ventures has always held risk (ie “Winnie”, the misjudged Winston Churchill musical, which lost £1.5 million) but Wright makes the strong point that the decline of the flop and the decline of the British musical in general are tightly linked, a point which is rarely stressed. Thus Wright’s book not only highlights the amusement of the British flop, but also that as the musical changes in format, it moves from something innovative and new to a heritage product developed only for revenue and not as art.

This book really offers something for everyone: an academic study of musicals, a history of social change, a tribute to the daring and a catalogue of how bitchy the British press can be. Seek it out, if only to learn more about how you can make a musical out of premature ejaculation.