The failure of a West End musical is never a cause for celebration – unless you’re Steve Brookstein, that is, winner of the first series of The X Factor, and who proves the lie of the instant path to fame that the programme is supposed to provide, since he’s been more or less relegated to obscurity since.
But he revived his long campaign of bitterness against the show on Saturday night, following the sudden announcement of the imminent closure of I Can’t Sing!, the West End musical based on it, tweeting:
Good News: X Factor Musical #ICantSing is to close 10th May.
Bad News: Expect more "happy" pictures of Cowell will his dogs and baby.
— Steve Brookstein (@stevebrookstein) April 26, 2014
He then added; “I might have a glass of wine and eat one of my son’s Easter eggs to celebrate.”
That, of course, says more about Brookstein than it does about the musical. Whatever you may think of the show, the gloating in the immediate wake of the loss of employment to a lot of actors and crew is neither attractive nor appropriate.
Not that the announcement would have necessarily come as too much of a surprise to them. I heard that the show has been playing to audiences of 600 at some performances last week in the 2,286 seat Palladium – little more than a quarter of capacity. But perhaps the hubris behind launching what turned out to be something of a vanity project for the walking ego that is Simon Cowell began with booking one of London’s largest theatres to begin with.
On the other hand, as I wrote in my own review of the show for The Stage, and also predicted its possible future,
It is appropriate that this would-be variety spectacle should come to the London Palladium – once home to British TV’s most famous variety show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. More recent legacies of The X Factor were the TV casting shows for The Sound of Music and The Wizard Of Oz, which also played at this venue. But I doubt I Can’t Sing! will emulate the success of either of those two already beloved titles.
My doubts have proven well-founded. It’s too early to begin a full post-mortem, since the body is still alive (at least till May 10), but there are certainly already lessons to be learnt from it. First, of course, is that hype alone doesn’t sell a musical. Ever since the idea for the show was first publicly floated, after a private workshop when Cowell first saw it and greenlit it for production, a lot of column inches have been written about the show everywhere. Some musicals have to fight hard for publicity; this show generated its own, with hardly a day going by without something about Cowell in the papers. That’s how The X Factor works: it puts itself at the centre of the popular conversation.
Another lesson is my own suspicion that the show was rushed into production before it was necessarily ready. That workshop was in January 2013; and just over a year later, it began performances at the Palladium. When I interviewed Cowell for The Stage the week before the opening, he admitted to me,
I don’t know if we were a bit rash or not. But I went down to see the workshop and straight away said, ‘I’m in’. Within 24 hours, we had put the money up and got the London Palladium booked. I thought it was quite normal to move that quickly, but then I found out that it was not!
But musicals don’t usually move that fast, and for a reason: they need gestation and development time. But the ultimate proof of the pudding was in the eating. And here’s where the critics played their own part. I saw some virtues, particularly the fact that it had an original score, but I had more serious doubts about the book, and wrote that “Harry Hill comes unstuck trying to give it some flailing structure and atmosphere.”
Those doubts were, it has to be said, not shared by all my colleagues. In fact, many were actually very favourable, but they ran the gamut from one star (in the Sunday Times) to five (in the Daily Express), with a lot in the middle of three to four. As cast member Scott Garnham tweeted,
Proving theatre really is subjective. I'd much rather be in a show people love or hate than one everyone thinks is 'ok'! #journeytoadream
— Scott Garnham (@scottgarnham) March 30, 2014
Proving theatre really is subjective. I’d much rather be in a show people love or hate than one everyone thinks is ‘ok’!
But if the critics didn’t kill the show, what did? I suspect that The X Factor is a self-cannibalizing beast: just as the musical divided camps, there are as many who hate the TV show as love it. But more importantly, do those that love it love it enough to spend up to £87.50 a ticket to see a stage facsimile of what they’re seeing for free on TV?