The definitive story ofMoose Murders,Broadways most notorious bomb.
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We should not still be talking aboutMoose Murders.
(Well, after she demands to know how I got her number.)
This is not a singular badge of honor.
Yet theMoosehas come to stand for them all.
But wearestill talking aboutMoose Murders.
A first-time no-name director who cast his wife with top billing.
A critic who found himself seated behind a vomit-covered patron brought in off the street to paper the house.
And then theres the name itself.Moose Murders.
(In 2019, that theater-district restaurant introduced a cocktail, The Murdered Moose, on the shows birthday.
)Moose Murdershad whatSpringtime for Hitlerwanted.
The shows writer, Arthur Bicknell, was riding high in the early 1980s.
I was being courted by all kinds of people.
My reviews likened me to Arthur Miller, Eugene ONeill, Albert Innaurato, Bicknell said recently.
I was feeling my oats, so I just wrote this silly play.
Actually, I remember where I wrote it, too.
The guy who was going to be producingMy Great Dead SisterOff Broadway gave me his office downtown.
I felt very cool.
Public-access television was the inspiration.
Id been writing slice-of-life or historical dramas, but I wanted to do something that was not normal.
He opted to put them into a murder mystery, a popular genre onstage at the time.
Bicknell also drew from childhood summers spent at his familys camp on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks.
And just like that, they had a director.
Roach wanted to do something nice for his wife, Bicknell writes.
If there were any discussions of an out-of-town tryout, Bicknell doesnt remember them.
It was all so naive, really, he said.
Just This is golden, and this is funny, and so all you need is money.
Lets do as few previews as possible too what have we got to lose?
(Stinky, as he makes it very well known, wants to sleep with his mother.)
Lauraines husband, Nelson, and Sidneys caretaker, Nurse Dagmar, are also in tow.
(Buffalo has a baffling combination of appropriative face paint and an Irish accent.)
Roach, according to Bicknell, loved the script.
(He cant say for himself; he died in 2018.)
Everybody I showed the damn script to laughed and laughed and laughed, Bicknell said.
The mistake, of course, is to equate funny with good.
With Roach came Fisher, his partner in a company called Force Ten Productions.
It was and ultimately would remain relatively small.
(The company later settled a$30 million lawsuit claiming that the film was too similar toRocky.
Stallones role was rewritten as a wrestling manager.)
Is this a porno?
Bicknell hoped to cast Hollywood talent, but having a newbie like Roach as director made this difficult.
Anne Meara, Bicknell writes in his memoir, refused him repeatedly.
Who is he again?
In her final refusal, Bicknell claims, Meara told him to call her when his director was dead.
Arden, who made an entrance from her garden with flowers in hand, had changes in mind.
She didnt like the line, I have more leather finery upstairs.
She didnt like that implication, Bicknell said.
But she did like the idea of leather pants.
Back in New York, auditions began.
The beginning was quite delightful.
(Chaplinnever openedand lost $4 million in the process.)
Holland Taylor read for the Nazi-esque nurse, Dagmar, and didnt get the part.
I didnt have the opportunity to read the play before I was doing the reading, she says.
To speak the truth, Im not even sure Ieverread the play.
(In his book, Bicknell says McTigue told him she adored the script.
I did my homework?
For all I know, I was just complimenting the author.)
I was pretty out-there in those days, Gable, who got the role, said.
I was very fearless.
Anyway, it was for naught.
Eve Arden had come around and agreed to star as Hedda.
The play, at least from early rehearsals, didnt seem doomed.
Ardens very first table read, script in hand, was good, and she had star quality.
She had a lot of rules, Ill tell you.
We were not to mention anything shed done prior toMildred Pierce.
You could not mention that she was one of the Ziegfeld Follies girls, Bicknell says.
Her age was absolutely taboo.
But the situation deteriorated quickly.
I cant tell you how sweet and how kind and just polite she was, Hobel recalls.
When she entered a room or took the stage, she exuded professionalism.
She struggled a little bit with memorization at that stage in her life.
You could tell it was just getting a little bit more difficult for her.
Roachs inexperience did not help.
You dont know where to look.
I was a green kid out of acting school.
I had to teach a guy to fall down the stairs.
Hobel remembers accidentally doing so herself during a performance, when her tap-dancing routine went awry.
Shed signed on after hearing that a friend, Pat Collins, would be doing the lighting.
Broadway was really a freelancers business.
I didnt know anything about the piece at that point, Kellogg says.
Ever.Ever, Bicknell says.
Instead, Arden and her husband just drank away the evening, trying to unwind.
They should have sent Ricka, Bicknell says.
Ricka could have gotten that woman to learn her lines, if anybody could.
Gable is more forgiving.
It was very difficult for her, Gable says.
She was quite elderly at that time.
It was her last attempt, I think, at relevance.
(Gable later wrote a scathingtell-all forEsquirethat she says Arden begged her not to publish.
I did have some guilt about that, but I just had to get it out of my system.
It was like an exorcism.)
During one rehearsal, Bicknell says Arden forgot her own characters last name.
As the show hurtled toward its first performance, I was rationalizing like crazy, Bicknell says.
On the night of the first preview, as Arden took the stage, the audience burst into applause.
Then the show started.
She lost her place.
The real water raining down on the set to create a stormy Adirondack feel drowned out the actors voices.
The chase scenes timing was off.
The action was all over the place.
Plus, Bicknell admits, the plot was impossible.
In the shows final scene, Arden was meant to pour two poisoned cocktails To you, Gay dearest.
My last remaining child.
A very special vodka martini … with a twist!
and toss her own over her shoulder instead of drinking it.
That was Ardens only performance ofMoose Murders.
She withdrew amicably due to artistic differences, the producers statement said.
(ThePostwent with the headline A STAR IS SHORN.)
Previews were put on hold until a replacement could be found.
She reportedly snuck out of the theatre at midshow.
Elaine Stritch also was on the short list.
But Holland Taylors reputation as a quick study won out.
I was literally out of money, she says now.
I was signing a tab at Joe Allens to eat.
When that [Moose Murders] came along, it actually bailed me out.
I dont think they can even run workshops that long anymore, because youre not paid, Taylor says.
I mean, I think I was paid carfare.
I think it was $35 a week.
The play was going to open and close very quickly, which everyone knew, Taylor says.
I did it knowing that I was going intoBreakfast With Les and Bessright afterward.
So I knew that would make me sane again.
Taylors arrival temporarily recharged the cast.
Shes just a powerhouse.
She just took that role with two hands and dove right in, Hobel says.
I just remember rehearsals resuming very rapidly at that point.
Taylor was immediately off book, a relief to the cast.
He realized he was still directing for Eve.
It was a lot of hard work, and it was very, very nervous-making.
There was no question the production was very wrong-handed.
So I knew it was on its way out, on a jet.
The rest of the cast started scattering to the wings like rats from a sinking ship.
And I put my hands out and screamed at them, Get back here.
We all had to line up and face our curtain call with bravery.
Hiring her had solved one problem, but that didnt do anything about the script.
I never could make anything of the play when I did finally read it, Taylor says.
I didnt know what it was, and the production certainly didnt know.
Was it trying to be an Adirondacks mystery, a gay comedy, a black comedy?
She did attempt to correct some of the more concrete issues, like the inaudible actors.
Its really insane to have speakers producing loud noise behind the set when youre trying to play a comedy.
That would be a createdbyArthur Bicknell memory.
He, along with his friend the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, attended a press performance prior to opening night.
Unfortunately forMoose Murders, Rich was seated near a man covered in his own vomit.
One thing that I remember, besides the smell, was how empty the house was.
I didnt know it at the time, but they couldnt even give tickets away by normal means.
They were giving them out to whoever mental patients or homeless people.
Thats how desperate they were.
When the odor became too strong, Rich and Wasserstein moved to the back of the theater.
There were plenty of seats there.
For opening night, the theater was flooded with flowers, a lot of which came from Robertsons father.
Gable describes it like the winners circle at a horse race.
Bicknell thought they still had a shot.
To me, it went okay.
For the first time, Im sitting in the third row rather than the back.
Holland is really good.
Everybody is laughing, and were having a good time.
Im thinkingmaybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, Bicknell says.
The audience felt otherwise.
(If there was a party, I would have blocked that out, Taylor says.)
Frank Richopted for a mercy killing.
There was probably some critic fatigue when it came to the murder-mystery genre, too.
Mara Hobel says her mother gently broke the news to her that it was now a good-bye party.
(Quite the contrary, Rich says.
It would have been a firing offense at theTimesand possibly theDaily News.Maybe not thePost.)
The reviews were so bad they actually drew curiosity-seekers, according to Gable.
There were lines around the block for the second night.
People were furious that it had closed, she says.
That was the problem, Gable recalls.
Audiences and critics alike forgot that I wasplayinga singer who was tone-deaf.
None of this was clear to the audience.
The fact that this bizarre script was actually out-there.
The bane of drama reviewing is most stuff is in the middle.
Its not great or terrible.
You remember whats really great and whats really spectacularly bad, Rich says.
You couldnt haveMoose Murderstoday.
That is, perhaps, the secret ingredient to the plays infamy.
