March 20, 1983, Sunday (Notice date this was written!)
THEATER; ON THE PARTICULAR PLEASURE OF SEEING A LEGENDARY FLOP
By FRANK RICH
Like everyone who caught the theater bug at an early age, I always made a point of saving Playbills. Not just my Playbills, mind you, but the entire world's: between a matinee and evening performance during adolescence, I would skip dinner in order to tour Times Square garbage cans and scoop up the programs of all the plays I had not seen. People who share this affliction surely know how near and dear those Playbills become as the years pass by. That's why we weep unabashedly over the scene in Moss Hart's memoir ''Act One'' in which the author's angry father torments his elderly, theater-loving aunt into ''dropping her beloved programs from trembling hands all over the floor.'' It's as if Hart's father had sacked a holy shrine.

Like everyone who caught the theater bug at an early age, I always made a point of saving Playbills. Not just my Playbills, mind you, but the entire world's: between a matinee and evening performance during adolescence, I would skip dinner in order to tour Times Square garbage cans and scoop up the programs of all the plays I had not seen. People who share this affliction surely know how near and dear those Playbills become as the years pass by. That's why we weep unabashedly over the scene in Moss Hart's memoir ''Act One'' in which the author's angry father torments his elderly, theater-loving aunt into ''dropping her beloved programs from trembling hands all over the floor.'' It's as if Hart's father had sacked a holy shrine.

But there comes a time in adulthood when one must either break this acquisitive habit entirely or rent a warehouse. I quit cold turkey, not to be overly exact about it, on Sept. 14, 1967. Or almost. There are still rare occasions when the old urge takes over and a Playbill simply must be tucked away for posterity. These exceptions are not the ones you might expect. I now realize that there's no point in saving programs from great nights in the theater. Those nights become part of history and will be profusely documented forever; it's always possible to dig up a Playbill from ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,'' after all, if really necessary. The Playbills that are truly worth saving are the rarest: those from the worst nights in the theater. And not just any worst night, either, but the very worst - those of the legendary bombs.

What makes certain bombs into legends? It's hard to say, precisely - they don't wear fur coats. Once it was a mark of distinction for a play to close in one night, but in these troubled times even that phenomenon is a sad commonplace. Some theater people define legendary bombs by the amount of money that went down the drain, or the high caliber of talent expended, or the extravagant foolhardiness of the esthetic mission. Others let Joe Allen, the theater district bistro, be the final arbiter: that restaurant has a whole wall bedecked with posters from a select group of famous turkeys. Whatever the definition, it can't be quantified - a flop just must have a certain je ne sais quoi to rise to legendary status. But what I do know is this: the only Playbill I've saved thus far in this decade is the one from ''Moose Murders.''

''Moose Murders,'' for those with short memories, was a catastrophe that reared its ugly stuffed head, complete with antlers, last month. Let's not review its contents here except to say that it was a comedy whose climax consisted of a gauze-wrapped quadriplegic rising from his wheelchair to kick a man wearing a moose costume in the groin.

In any case, I come not to bury ''Moose Murders'' again, but, in a fashion, to praise it. A legend it most certainly is. Those few of us who saw ''Moose Murders'' will always look back at it less with anger than with guilty pleasure. Indeed, since reviewing this show, I have received a near-flood of mail from ''Moose Murders'' audience members who, while detesting the play, were glad to have seen it, for reasons I'll explain. (You can bet that these correspondents are saving their Playbills, too.) Other letters have arrived from jealous folk who sorely resent not having made it to ''Moose Murders'' just to experience for themselves how atrocious it was. (These correspondents, no doubt, were frantically searching through Broadway trashcans for the Playbill the morning after the openingclosing night.)

Why the regret about having missed a dreadful play? Why the guilty pleasure in having seen it? The crazy thing about a ''Moose Murders'' is that it does remind one, however backhandedly, of the particular excitement of witnessing live theater.

If a great play unites audience and actors alike into a transcendent emotional or intellectual journey, so a truly wretched one can band audience and actors together into a shared nightmare. As passengers will always remember an ecstatic trans-Atlantic journey on the France, so will survivors always remember the camaraderie of their ill-starred crossing on the Titanic. A communal, we're-all-inthis-together feeling takes over, sink or swim.

It's not an experience available at run-of-the-mill flops, which are just boring and conventionally wasteful, or at the movies: while the audience at ''Heaven's Gate'' may draw tightly together, the actors making fools of themselves on the screen are not there to share in the collective embarrassment - they're already back sipping white wine and getting tan in Malibu. In my theatergoing years, the Broadway show that best illustrates the special allure of seeing a legendary flop - and diehard theatergoers' ravenous hunger for that adventure - is a musical called ''Rachael Lily Rosenbloom and Don't You Ever Forget It!'' Does anybody remember it? It never exactly opened. After a few preview performances at the Broadhurst in December 1973, a discreet announcement appeared in the Saturday papers that the show would close, prior to its premiere, that night. Happening to be in the vicinity of the Times Square half-price ticket booth that day, I bought a pair in the mezzanine for the musical's farewell performance. Arriving at the Broadhurst just before 8 P.M., I was startled to discover that the sold-out sign was up and that strangers were waving $50 bills in the air for any available ticket. Not for a second was I tempted to clear an $80 profit on my pair and miss out on this spectacle. Inside the theater, the atmosphere was so heady you'd think you were at a Tony Awards gala. There were celebrities from all the arts, ranks of standees in the back of the orchestra, paparazzi and autograph hounds pushing and shoving. When the lights dimmed, a voice came over the loud-speaker to announce that ''Tonight 'Rachael Lily Rosenbloom' will be played without an intermission.'' These words alone were enough to prompt the audience to break into a prolonged, punchdrunk ovation.

What followed was a musical fantasy of surpassing lavishness that made no sense, at any level, from beginning to end. The majority of the crowd fell into a sullen, open-mouthed stupor like that with which the audience greets the opening scenes of ''Springtime for Hitler,'' the fictitious Broadway flop within Mel Brooks's film ''The Producers.'' But no one walked out: ''Rachael Lily Rosenbloom'' became an existential test which everyone was determined to pass. The cast, many of whom were dressed in silver lame g-strings, attacked their tasks as if they were performing ''Guys and Dolls.''

After the show, I ran into an acquaintance and asked him why the house was packed for the closing night of such a fiasco. He surveyed the lobby and said, ''These are all the people who didn't see 'Breakfast at Tiffany's.' '' He was right. To this day, there are thousands of theatergoers, me included, who regret having missed that legendary, 1960's bomb -a big-budget musical starring Richard Chamberlain and Mary Tyler Moore, adapted by Edward Albee from the Truman Capote story, that the producer David Merrick folded in previews at the Majestic. We weren't going to make the same mistake twice.

It was also at ''Rachael Lily Rosenbloom'' that I learned the answer to the eternal question that always follows in the wake of such theatrical disasters. That question, of course, is, ''Why didn't anyone realize how hopeless this show was before risking all the trouble and expense and public ridicule of putting it on?'' Some people speculate that the creators of a ''Rachael Lily Rosenbloom'' or ''Breakfast at Tiffany's'' or ''Moose Murders'' are suffering from temporary insanity. Others postulate that such shows are tax gimmicks or maybe clandestine pranks hatched by foreign agents out to undermine the American way of life. But the real answer is more benign and simple than that. Theater people, like all people, would always rather believe good news than bad news, especially about their own work - and someone is always willing to give them encouragement, no matter how ridiculous the project at hand may be.

If a musical on its way to Broadway gets terrible reviews and audience catcalls in Boston, it's often said, that musical's creators will ignore those omens entirely and instead choose to believe the opinion of the Ritz-Carlton waiter who confides, while waiting for a tip, that he found the show superior to ''My Fair Lady.'' At ''Rachael Lily Rosenbloom,'' one could see this process in action: in scattered pockets throughout the otherwise shell-shocked house were claques of theatergoers who sang along with the musical numbers and gave mini-standing ovations at the end of most of them.

These partisans had clearly seen earlier previews of the show and adored it; they were in tears when the final curtain rang down. No doubt there were other such ''Rachael Lily Rosenbloom'' fans at every stage of the show's development. There will always be somebody who loves a bomb, no matter how deadly, and there will always be at least one person connected with the production who will grab on to the straws of hope that these cheerleaders provide.

This myopia can afflict all theater artists, however mighty. It has happened to nearly everyone. But when the turkey finally rests in its grave, its perpetrators often bounce back. Pulling out my cherished Playbill for ''Rachael Lily Rosenbloom,'' I find that its co-producer went on to produce ''Evita''; that its co-librettist went on to write ''Dreamgirls''; that its female leads have recently found acclaim and stardom in ''Nine'' and ''Little Shop of Horrors''; that three of its chorus people were later leads in ''A Chorus Line'' (one winning a Tony Award) and another was a star of ''Ain't Misbehavin'.'' They probably look back and laugh, too, by now.

I can't promise that all will end so happily for the cast and crew of ''Moose Murders.'' We'll wait 10 years and see. In the meantime, I'm holding on tightly to my rare Playbill. It's a remembrance of a genuine theatrical occasion, and just possibly, given my correspondents who would kill for it, an annuity for my old age.