#1 – Batman the Musical

In 1999 Jim Steinman, the man who wrote many of Meat Loaf’s most famous songs, was commissioned to write a Broadway musical about Batman, which would be directed by Tim Burton. The show never went anywhere, but Steinman’s demos live on, and some of the songs have been repurposed – Steinman himself re-used some tracks for Dance of the Vampire, and Meatloaf grabbed some of the songs for Bat out of Hell III.

I’m not quite sure what happened to Batman the Musical, but I do know that Warner Theatrical dumped it in favor of Lestat, another musical ripe for this list (that adaptation of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles featured music by Elton John and Bernie Taubin, and ran for a month). Steinman released the demos on his website, some of which are actually pretty good and, with some work, could have been incorporated into a reasonable show. As the megafans at the Batman the Musical fansite Dark Knight of the Soul say, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Phantom of the Opera were both major Broadway hits, so the weirdly gothic darkness of Batman the Musical may not have hurt it.

As for the show’s plot – not sure. The Joker and Catwoman would have been in it, as Steinman wrote songs for both of them. Here’s one of The Joker’s songs, Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?

#2 – Planet of the Apes… A Musical Trip

Okay, I’m stretching the rules a bit here. I’m not really certain how ‘official’ this bizarre rock concept album is – after all, it doesn’t understand that the Planet of the Apes is not a different planet in space. But the band who recorded it, known as Electric Cowboy, were given the honor of being on the Mego Toy Company float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in 1974 – dressed up in full Apes regalia.

Planet of the Apes… A Musical Trip was apparently brought to the Electric Cowboy, a Connecticut band, by their manager. Legend has it that the songs on the album were written by an unnamed (but we’re assured big time) songwriting pros, as demos for a children’s album. The Electric Cowboy recorded the songs as acid rock tracks, and there were actors playing the parts of Gaylen, Dr. Zaius and “Irko” inserted between tracks. These characters would talk about the differences between men and apes, and the differences between Earth and the Planet of the Apes.

They would lead into the songs with a lesson about not judging people by the way they looked, or about how dancing helps get out aggression – absolutely retarded stuff like that. The songs themselves are right on the border of being good, and some of them are certifiably bizarre and trippy.

Here’s the intro to the album:Here’s the last track on the album, The Planet of the Apes (Reprise):
#3 – It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s Superman

1966 was the year that Batman turned
TV and comic books upside with its Technicolor pop art shenanigans.
While a March 1966 Broadway opening means that a Superman musical, It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s Superman, probably
wasn’t too influenced by the January debut of the Dynamic Duo, it
definitely reflected the same attitude towards comics and comic
characters. In other words, it’s really silly.

It’s
also pretty terrible. The show ran for a modest 129 performances,
closing about three months after it opened. The show took serious
liberties with the Superman mythos, introducing a lame romantic
obstacle in the person of Daily Planet columnist Max Mencken, who is
jealous of Lois Lane’s feelings for Superman. The villain is Dr. Abner
Sedgewick, a ten-time Nobel Prize losing scientist who wants to take over the world so he can destroy Sweden in revenge.

The music and lyrics were by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, an otherwise powerhouse team who brought us Bye Bye Birdie and who would later go on to get a comic musical right with Annie. Their work on It’s a Bird… is fairly uninspired to these ears, and they have songs with titles like Bam! Pow! Zonk! (surely Batman must have been some sort of influence), although You’ve Got Possibilities has proven to have a life of its own outside the show.

The
show was turned into a TV special in 1975; it ran on ABC and was simply
wretched. It’s notable for casting the lovely Lesley Anne Warren as
Lois Lane. Everything else is nigh upon unwatchable, but don’t take my
word for it – I’ve embedded the program below.#4 – Captain America the Musical

If you read Marvel Comics in the 80s you might recognize this ad:

The musical was announced in 1985, with a debut set for 1986. The above ad ran in just about every single Marvel Comic in 1985 – meaning if you were like me and you obsessively bought every Secret Wars II crossover, you saw it about a thousand times.

The show was to be written by Mel Mandel and Norman Sachs, a duo whose only other credit that I can find is My Old Friends, a musical about a bunch of old folks living at a retirement home. It fell apart at some point long before it ever got anywhere, although BroadwayWorld.com has this song listing:

Captain America
Nobody Asked Me to Lead a Parade This Year
A Beautiful Girl
If I Could Fall in Love
Matter of Principle
Both Ways
Number One
Ruthless
Marvin Mittleman
For All the Wrong Reasons
Fly the Flag
The First Presidential
He’s My Hero
If You’re a Dreamer

I’ve spent the better part of the weekend trying to find any hint of these songs on the internet, but they seem to not exist. Mandel and Sachs seem to have actually written something…

The most intriguing part is just what the hell Cap’s little ‘special friend’ would have done in the show. Would Bucky have been a girl? Or something less… savory? It’s more likely that the casting call was simply a publicity ploy.

It turns out that Cap wasn’t the only Marvel hero to knocking on the stage door in the 80s; rumor has it that there was a Thor musical in development for a while.

I’ve been spending my holiday watching Fox’s excellent TV show Glee on DVD (buy it here from CHUD!) and it’s put me in a real musical mood. It’s led me to dig out some great musical movies on DVD (you’ll be seeing them pop up soon enough in my new blog, The Year of Living OCD), and it’s also led me to look into some truly odd geek-oriented musicals that never quite made it to the big time.

There are a ton of geek-oriented musical projects, from songs about superheroes to entire fan-made musicals, and some have been successful. The Evil Dead musical may end up adapted into a movie, for instance. And there’s a major Spider-Man Broadway show coming this year, with music by Bono and the Edge (and I bet this will be one of the worst things ever). But there are plenty more that never saw the light of day… or that shouldn’t have. These five projects are the really strange ones, ones that failed or fizzled. And they’re all officially sanctioned on some level – fan-made stuff won’t be represented here. These are just five that appealed to me – I’m sure there’s a lot more geek-oriented musical weirdness out there.

By the way, my apologies for the multiple page nature of the article. Our current coding system gives some hassle on some browsers when embedding multiple videos, so I thought breaking things up over multiple pages made more sense. This isn’t a hit whoring ploy.

#5 – Carrie The Musical

A Broadway production about a telekinetic girl who killed everyone at her prom? Yup. Lawrence D. Cohen (not to be confused with Larry Cohen), the screenwriter of Brian DePalma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, thought that the story would make a heckuva musical; not many people agreed with him and the show closed quickly, becoming one of the biggest flops in the history of the Great White Way.

The show was probably doomed from the start – numbers were being rewritten through the opening, there were multiple technical problems, and it was (for the time) the most expensive Broadway show ever mounted. The show was getting booed at previews, and it closed three days after it opened (despite the theater being sold out in advance), thanks to harsh reviews and terrible word of mouth. 

I haven’t listened to the entire show, but the songs I’ve heard range from okay to pretty good; Carrie the Musical has found a cult audience in recent years, and there have been rumblings of an off-Broadway revival in the last couple of months. It seems like this could have worked – the talent was there, and some of the numbers seem up to snuff – but I guess a musical about a murderous teen esper needed to be a little bit cheaper to make it.

Here’s And Eve Was Weak, with Betty Buckley as Margaret White and Linzi Hately as Carrie. This song is from the first act, and it’s when Carrie tells her mother about the ‘plug it up’ incident in the school shower.