Broadway's Debacles Live On at Joe Allen's ‘Flop Wall'

New York Times

28-04-2025

Good morning. It's Monday. Today we'll look at a wall of posters in a Manhattan restaurant that spotlights failed Broadway shows. We'll also get details on a state senator who wants to take away Tesla's right to operate five dealerships in New York.
There's a place where Broadway flops live on: a wall at the restaurant Joe Allen in the theater district that is lined with posters of duds and disasters. 'Everyone remembers the hits,' Joe Allen's website says, 'but we revel in the flops.' My colleague Sarah Bahr, who revels in both, writes about what it takes to make the flop wall:
Donald Margulies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of the 2000 drama 'Dinner With Friends,' has a spot on the wall.
But it's not that play that earned him that place.
It's a show almost no one has heard of, a comedy called 'What's Wrong With This Picture?' that starred Faith Prince. It opened on Broadway on Dec. 8, 1994, and ran for just 12 performances.
A poster for that production is one of the more than 50 posters for little-known Broadway shows featured on what is known as the 'flop wall,' the brick wall opposite the bar at Joe Allen. Among them are 'Doctor Zhivago,' which ran for 23 performances a decade ago, and 'Moose Murders,' which closed the same night it opened in 1983.
'Sometimes having a life in the theater is electrifying, and sometimes it is electrocuting,' Margulies said after a rehearsal for his latest play, 'Lunar Eclipse,' which is set to begin performances Off Broadway next month.
The first poster at Joe Allen went up in 1965, a few months after the restaurant opened. It was for the musical 'Kelly,' about a daredevil busboy who claimed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived. The cast gave it to the restaurant's eponymous owner. They asked him to hang it as a joke, said the restaurant's longtime manager, Mary Hattman. Since Allen's death in 2021 at age 87, she has been in charge of deciding on new additions.
The rule was once that a production had to have cost at least $500,000 and run for less than a week, Mr. Allen told The New York Times in 2011. Nowadays, Hattman said, there are no formal criteria. It's often a matter of how public the flop was, she said. For instance, the 2004 production of 'Dracula, the Musical' starring Tom Hewitt ran for 157 performances — the only show on the wall to reach triple digits — but was notorious. Ben Brantley, then the chief theater critic for The Times, called it 'bad and boring.'
Margulies is not the only writer of some renown to make an appearance: Stephen Sondheim is represented by 'Merrily We Roll Along,' a 1981 musical that deconstructs the unraveling of a three-way friendship. Though it initially ran for just 16 performances, it has become a much-loved show in the decades since. A 2023 revival that starred Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe won four Tony Awards.
The most recent poster added was for 'Face Value,' a 1993 comedy by David Henry Hwang. Hwang asked that it be put up last year when 'Yellow Face,' his semi-autobiographical play about staging 'Face Value,' ran on Broadway.
It's unusual for a show to be added retroactively, Hattman said, though it does happen on occasion, as with the 1957 musical comedy 'Copper and Brass,' whose monthlong run came and went before the restaurant opened.
Most of the flops on the wall are from the 1970s and '80s, when a shift in tastes away from musicals, rising production costs and economic instability spelled curtains for many shows. Now, with greater awareness of the financial risks and a focus on spectacle and adaptations, shows that actually make it to Broadway almost never close before opening night. The last to do so, excluding productions affected by the pandemic, was 'Bobbi Boland' in 2003, about a former beauty pageant queen.
It has been nearly a decade since a contemporary show was added. There has been no shortage of candidates, among them the campy 'Diana, the Musical,' Andrew Lloyd Webber's baffling 'Bad Cinderella' and Elton John's over-the-top 'Tammy Faye.' But the restaurant does not add posters on its own, Hattman said; all requests originate with the cast, the writers or the producers of a flop.
Allen told The Times in 2011 that he was glad to function as an unofficial documentarian for an industry in which it's easier to make a killing than a living.
'Sometimes there's a bit of anger in the beginning when you put the poster up,' he said then. 'But it becomes some kind of badge of heroism over time.'
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The latest New York news
New York considers a move to shut down Tesla dealerships
Elon Musk's alliance with President Trump has prompted Democratic lawmakers in Albany to propose taking away Tesla's power to sell its cars directly to consumers.
State Senator Patricia Fahy, a Democrat whose district includes Albany, is one of several state lawmakers pushing to revoke a legislative waiver that has allowed Tesla to operate five dealerships in New York rather than sell through dealer franchises, as other carmakers do.
Fahy, who once supported Tesla's right to open its own dealerships in the state, says the company no longer deserves favorable treatment and wants it to forfeit the five licenses. Musk, who is Tesla's chief executive and has led the Department of Government Efficiency in Washington, is 'part of an administration that is killing all the grant funding for electric vehicle infrastructure, killing wind energy, killing anything that might address climate change,' Fahy said. 'Why should we give them a monopoly?'
My colleague Benjamin Oreskes says that Fahy has become so disenchanted with Tesla since Musk started DOGE that she has taken part in demonstrations about a planned Tesla dealership in Colonie, N.Y., an Albany suburb.
Tesla did not respond to requests for comment. Musk, in a social media post that he later deleted, criticized New York's efforts against Tesla, writing that it was 'improper for lawmakers to target a single person or company.' (Last week, as Tesla announced that its profits had dropped 71 percent, he said that he planned to start spending less time in Washington.)
Lost and found
Dear Diary:
I recently went to the Lost and Found at Grand Central, a musty office tucked in a subterranean corner of the terminal.
I explained to the man there that I was looking for my bright orange AirPods case, which I had left on a train about a month before.
He disappeared and then returned with a bin of at least 100 AirPods cases, each one carefully bagged and tagged. We looked through them together, one by one.
A young woman appeared at the counter. She said she was looking for her purse. Another employee disappeared into the back.
'I've been here four times since Tuesday to see if it's shown up,' the woman told me, an air of desperation in her voice. She ticked off some of the important things in the purse: her wallet, a favorite lipstick, a deodorant she loved.
I told her about my missing AirPods case. We stood there looking forlorn together.
The employee helping her emerged from the back. He was holding a purse. Her face lit up.
'Oh my god!' she said. 'I can't believe it!' She threw her arms around me, and we hugged.
By then, the man helping me had gotten to the bottom of the bin of AirPods cases. Mine wasn't there.
'I'm sorry you didn't get your case back,' the young woman said.
'Well, I'm really glad they found your purse,' I replied.
'Thanks!' she said, running off to a train. 'If it's any consolation, they didn't find my gloves.'
— Jennifer Bleyer
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Natasha Cornelissen and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [e-mail].
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