Broadway Shows That Closed Before Opening Night

Mounting a Broadway show is a long, expensive, and work-intensive process. It takes years to get a show ready, and even before it officially opens for top-price tickets and to welcome in critics and writers to review it, producers, cast, and crew might work out the kinks and test reactions with a trial run outside of New York or actually play a few nights in its Broadway theater home in the form of "previews." This refers to a show that is not quite locked into its final presentation, with major elements of the show still in flux or subject to change. 

Sometimes, while trying to fix stuff in previews, either in New York or beforehand, the makers of a Broadway musical or play will realize that their show is too much of a disaster to fix, and they'll shutter the show, technically before it ever "officially" opens. Here are some productions that were all set to run on Broadway for years and years but shut down before their scheduled official debut.

America went through a lot of fads in the 1970s, including the Pet Rock, shag carpeting, and roller disco. But one of the most inexplicable was the trucker craze. Spawned by the boom in popularity of the adoption of big-rig technology like citizens band radios in regular cars to instantly communicate information about good gas prices and availability during the 1970s fuel crisis, America on the whole got into long-haul culture. The C.B. radio-based novelty song "Convoy" topped the pop chart, the trucker show B.J. and the Bear was a TV hit, and Smokey and the Bandit was among many popular trucker movies. This blue collar fascination also drove on up to the Great White Way.

According to The New York Times, Truckload was set to debut in Broadway's Lyceum Theatre in September 1975. Pitched as a "road musical" about "Americans in transit," Truckload boasted a score from Grease arranger Louis St. Louis and a script by Tony Award-winning writer Hugh Wheeler (who also had the perfect name to write a show about vehicles). But despite the right climate and a good pedigree, Truckload flopped. It made it through just six unofficial preview performances before shutting down for good.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy's efforts to root out Communists in the highest levels of American politics in the 1950s is one of the ugliest and most contentious moments in American history. He played off of America's fear of Soviet Russia to take down enemies and ruin lives with merely an accusation or suggestion that the person had at least a passing interest in Communism. And in the late 1980s, Tom O'Horgan, who helped bring important shows like Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar to Broadway, thought that the saga of McCarthy would make an excellent musical.

O'Horgan wrote the music for Senator Joe, writes Vulture, while actor and writing newcomer Perry Arthur Kroeger provided a script and lyrics. Billed (per the Chicago Tribune) as "a song cartoon of the '50s as seen through the life and times of Sen. Joseph McCarthy," Senator Joe began rehearsals in October 1988. McCarthy was an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver caused by years of overconsumption. Senator Joe addressed this element of his life with a musical number (hosted by an actor playing legendary reporter Edward R. Murrow) set in McCarthy's liver — dancers twirled around while dressed as diseased cells.

Senator Joe lasted three preview performances over two days in January 1989, shutting down because producer Adela Holzer couldn't pay the actors. In the weeks after the closure, Holzer told O'Horgan that she'd raised enough money to stage the show again, which didn't happen because she was arrested for grand larceny.

Jean Arthur was best known for her work in 1930s movies like You Can't Take It With You, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Arthur also did a lot of theater, notably starring in Peter Pan in 1950, on the cusp of her 50th birthday. It was a major theatrical event then in 1967 when, according to The New York Times, Arthur announced her return to Broadway via the new comedic play, The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake. 

Overseen by prolific and powerful theatrical producer Cheryl Crawford, the show marked the first Broadway gig for playwright Richard Chandler, who happened to be Crawford's assistant. The plot, which reflected the hot-at-the-time and very 60s notion of a "Generation Gap" between older adults and the up-and-coming anti-Vietnam War counterculture movement, concerned an elderly and conservative Midwesterner (Arthur) who takes a trip to New York to see her niece only to learn, to her shock and horror, that the young lady has fallen in with a band of hippies.

Previews of The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake began in October 1967, per The New York Times, but the official opening was delayed after Arthur collapsed on stage. Crawford floated the idea of calling off the entire show if Arthur was too sick to continue, and that's indeed what happened. The show ran for three preview performances and then disappeared. Arthur, who lived until 1991, never acted again.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery's 1943 book The Little Prince is a classic work of both children's literature and science fiction. It's a collection of stories about The Prince, a lonely and sensitive little boy from outer space who recollects his adventures to a pilot when both find themselves marooned in the Sahara Desert. The meat of the story and the most exciting happenings involve The Prince's interstellar adventures, but the creators of the Broadway musical adaptation, The Little Prince and the Aviator (including Sweeney Todd writer Hugh Wheeler) decided to significantly up the time and effort devoted to the pilot, a fairly ordinary and mopey guy. 

According to the Internet Broadway Database, previews were to begin on Dec. 31, 1981, only to be abruptly rescheduled for days later. Per Ken Mandelbaum's Not Since Carrie, the producer firing the original director and choreographer certainly didn't help the show get off on the right footing. Mandelbaum characterized The Little Prince and the Aviator as "a boring evening of disconnected scenes," on account of how the musical constantly switched between inexplicable flashbacks to events in the life of the pilot (played by Michael York, aka Basil Exposition from Austin Powers) and tales from The Prince (Anthony Rapp of Dazed and Confused and the original Broadway production of Rent). After 20 previews in January 1982, producers closed The Little Prince and the Aviator on the day before it was supposed to officially open, much to the surprise of cast and crew.

In the late 60s and early 1970s, Broadway was rocked by a couple of nudity-containing shows with explicit sexual themes. Influenced by the hippie, countercultural movement, the musical Hair famously included an end-of-show dance party with a naked cast, while the musical vignette collection Oh! Calcutta! included several long scenes with unclothed actors. Let My People Come also involved a lot of frank talk from nude people about sexual behaviors (and simulations thereof) in a series of bits set to music, only it was a lot more explicit. 

The names of the most of the songs in the show are too raunchy and direct to print. One tune, a parody of the 1940s standard "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" about a man that was really good at performing a particular physical act, got Let My People Come writer Earl Wilson, Jr., sued.

Let My People Come, promoted simply as a "sexual musical," ran for 1,200 performances at the small Village Gate venue in New York's more libertine Greenwich Village before getting the call to jump over to a more visible and lucrative run at Broadway's Morosco Theater. Just before its scheduled opening, Wilson asked producer-director Phil Oesterman to remove his name from the show, because changes the latter made rendered the show "vulgar," he told The New York Times. Let My People Come still opened with previews, and after a whopping 128 of them over three months, the envelope-pushing show closed.