I love turkey!

Q: 
What's better than celebrating Thanksgiving with a big, juicy, turkey? 

A:  Celebrating with three of them!

Here are my
favorites:

The Capeman: Proof that just because one of the world's
best songwriters and
aNobel
Prize winner 
for literature get together, doesn't mean they'll
make a great musical.  (It did have some great
tunes, and despite the fact that the CD was recorded (and features
Marc Anthony), Paul Simon has refused to release it.  (I have an advance
copy, but don't tell anyone.))

The
Goodbye Girl:  Proof that just because you have one of
America's most prolific comedic playwrights,
the composer of
one of the greatest
musicals of all time, a Tony Award winning lyricist, a movie star and a theater star, doesn't mean you'll have a show that achieves even close to
the same success as the movie on which it is based.

Lestat: 
Proof that just because you have a movie company with almost an unlimited
budget as a producer,
one of the world's greatest popular music artists as a composer,
and source material enjoyed by millions and millions of people, doesn't
mean that your musical won't suck (pun intended).  Oh yeah, and by the
way, vampire musicals just don't work on stage.  Duh.

So what's to
learn from having eaten all this turkey, laced with so much tryptophan, it put
so many of us to sleep?

Two things:

1 – Musicals
are a collaborative art form.  Creating a musical is not writing a novel,
where you sit in a room by yourself at your keyboard and crank it out page by
page.  Creating a musical is not painting a picture, where you sit in
front of a canvas and use your own set of brushes and colors to complete your
vision.  Creating a great musical can't be done with just one
person.  It needs a composer, a lyricist, a book writer, a producer, actors,
designers, an orchestrator, musicians, and so on and so on.  And every
single one of those people needs to be delivering 110%.  That's one of the
reasons the failure rate for musicals is so high.  Put something that
requires perfection for not one party but several into an incredibly restrictive
financial model, and all of a sudden that 80% failure rate makes sense.

2 – Applying
converse logic to the above list says that if extremely well recognized,
experienced and lauded artists can produce flops, then unrecognized and
inexperienced artists can produce great shows.  So don't think that just
because you haven't won an award or sold a million records that you can't
create a great show.   

Because if they can suck, then you
can succeed.