The Undisputed Worst Play in Broadway History
It was a dark comedy called Moose Murders that premiered on February 22, 1983, at the Eugene O’Neil Theater in Midtown Manhattan. It was received so poorly by audiences and critics both, that the production was shut down later that very night.
The story takes place at the Wild Moose Lodge, a remote, once-great, but now neglected and run-down down resort in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. It had been just recently purchased by the heroes of play: the eccentric Holloway family, who hoped to restore it to its former glory.
The action begins after the family gets trapped inside the main lodge by a severe, Shining-esque blizzard, and starts up a murder mystery game with some of the resort’s more colorful guests. Within just minutes, young Lorraine Holloway is actually murdered, and the story itself becomes a whodunit.
It was most certainly meant to be a laugh-out-loud funny comedy, but the unnatural mix of totally incompatible and caricaturishly buffoonish characters was far too absurd to deliver the kind of biting satire its debutant writer Arthur Bicknell was hoping it would. Its most important inauthentic buffoons:
Sidney Holloway: The dying patriarch of the Holloway family, who spends the duration of the show wrapped head to toe in bandages that make him look like an Egyptian mummy.
Hedda Holloway: The family’s domineering matriarch, and unambiguous parody of the aging, over-the-hill Broadway starlet who won’t, or perhaps can’t, stop monologuing about her glory days.
Gay Holloway: Sidney and Hedda's energetic, tap dancing enthusiast daughter.
Stinky Holloway: Gay’s crude and unsophisticated brother, and the perpetually ill-timed comic relief.
Snooks Keene: A cynical, washed-up concert pianist staying at the lodge with her husband…
Bowie Keene: The vulgar slapstick foil to his brooding wife.
Joe Buffalo Dance: The lodge’s head dress and war paint-wearing Native American caretaker, who inexplicably speaks with an Irish accent throughout the show.
Here’s the link to today’s Daily game:
The plot was perfectly suited to their collectively stereotypical absurdity, but the performances were completely inconsistent. Some of the actors took their roles seriously, and tried to make the story feel like a genuine Agatha Christie-ish murder mystery, while others treated it like the farce it was. It made the whole thing a clunky mess, and it immediately earned the worst critical reviews a Broadway play has ever received:
Richard Hummler, Variety: ‘A catastrophe of monumental proportions.’
Dennis Cunningham, WCBS-TV: ‘If your name is Arthur Bicknell—or anything like it—change it.’
Brendan Gill, The New Yorker: ‘[It] would insult the intelligence of an audience consisting entirely of amoebas.’
Edwin Wilson, The Wall Street Journal: ‘A show that leaves you wondering not so much how it got to Broadway, but why it was ever written.’
Clive Barnes, The New York Post: ‘The worst play I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage… So indescribably bad that I do not intend to waste anyone’s time by describing it.’
Frank Rich of The New York Times felt differently, however, and his screed against the show has since become one of the most iconic reviews in Broadway’s history. Some excerpts:
‘FROM now on, there will always be two groups of theatergoers in this world: those who have seen ''Moose Murders,'' and those who have not. Those of us who have witnessed the play that opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theater last night will undoubtedly hold periodic reunions, in the noble tradition of survivors of the Titanic. Tears and booze will flow in equal measure, and there will be a prize awarded to the bearer of the most outstanding antlers. As for those theatergoers who miss ''Moose Murders'' - well, they just don't rate. A visit to ''Moose Murders'' is what will separate the connoisseurs of Broadway disaster from mere dilettantes for many moons to come.
The play begins in the exact manner of ''Whodunnit'' - itself one of the season's drearier offerings, though at the time of its opening we didn't realize how relatively civilized it was.
There's a loud thunderclap, and the curtain rises to reveal an elaborate, twolevel, dark wood set. Amusingly designed by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg, the set represents a lodge in the Adirondacks and is profusely decorated with the requisite stuffed moose heads. Though the heads may be hunting trophies, one cannot rule out the possibility that these particular moose committed suicide shortly after being shown the script that trades on their good name.
For much of Act I, this ensemble stumbles about mumbling dialogue that, as far as one can tell, is only improved by its inaudibility. Just before intermission, Stinky breaks out a deck of cards to give the actors, if not the audience, something to do. The lights go out in mid-game, and when they come up again, one of the characters has been murdered. Such is the comatose nature of the production that we're too busy trying to guess which stiff on stage is the victim to worry about guessing the culprit…
Even Act I of ''Moose Murders'' is inadequate preparation for the ludicrous depths of Act II. I won't soon forget the spectacle of watching the mummified Sidney rise from his wheelchair to kick an intruder, unaccountably dressed in a moose costume, in the groin. This peculiar fracas is topped by the play's final twist, in which Hedda serves her daughter Gay a poison-laced vodka martini. As the young girl collapses to the floor and dies in the midst of another Shirley Temple-esque buck and wing, her mother breaks into laughter and applause.
The 10 actors trapped in this enterprise, a minority of them of professional caliber, will not be singled out here. I'm tempted to upbraid the author, director and producers of ‘Moose Murders,’ but surely the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will be after them soon enough. Paging the A.S.P.C.A…’
Poor Arthur Bicknell pretty much went into hiding after the show was shut down, going back to work as a reservation clerk for Air France rather than attempting to find a way to revive it. He didn’t quit the theater forever, though. He started his own independent theater company in Ithaca, NY, in 2011, and a year later, broke his decades-long silence on his infamous flop in an interview with Playbill:
‘This play won't die... It will not die. I thought, well, this is not the only bad play that's ever been on Broadway. I thought it would be forgotten. [But] it just keeps going and going.’
‘It's one of those stories where you say, 'Well, it can't get any worse.' Then you turn the page and it does!’
He’s nevertheless leaned into it, and the next year, self-published his memoir under the title: Moose Murdered: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb, in reference to the full title of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove - Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
He wrote it in anticipation of an upcoming off-Broadway revival of the show, which he helped to rewrite alongside its producers, the Beautiful Soup Theater Collective.
Alas, it turned out to be no better than the original, at least according to the spiritual successor of Frank Rich, critic Charles Isherwood, who wrote in his 2013 review:
‘Although Mr. Bicknell has apparently done some rewriting — a reference to Martha Stewart would have been obscure three decades ago — the play is every bit as inane and inept as history has recorded. And, sad to say, there’s no joy to be had in attending its exhumation. It’s like attending a wake for someone who died 30 years ago, then being served Champagne that’s been sitting open during the interim.’
‘To have witnessed the unbelievable antics of these characters from a seat in the Eugene O’Neill Theater, a venerable Broadway house, must have been a truly surreal experience. Watching the same ludicrous proceedings as they unfold on the scuffed stage of the Connelly Theater in the East Village, on a flimsy set that would seem skimpy even for a middle school production of “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” does not feel like an epochal experience. It’s barely an endurable one.’
It’s unlikely Bicknell was surprised by the poor reception. Later in that same 2012 Playbill interview, he said:
‘I mean, this is bigger than I am. Moose Murders is a legendary flop. It's the standard by which all Broadway turkeys are measured. There's very little I can do about that…’
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