Too Soon: This trope has been blamed for the original Broadway production not running longer than it did (though its four-year run was a more than healthy one) and the failure of the 1986 West End transfer (which ran less than a year). In the mid-1980s, the AIDS crisis broke and had particularly devastating effects in the New York theatre community. Moreover, at this point the disease was thought to be exclusive to gays and drug needle sharers, and whenever the topic was being discussed in the news, this show — one of the few around, and certainly the only musical, that had gay characters — always seemed to be brought up. The thinking is that the negative connotations the show became saddled with pushed non-gay audiences away from it. (In the case of the West End version, though, opening just a few months before the original production of The Phantom of the Opera was probably a much bigger factor in its failure.)
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Does this fit into Distanced from Current Events?
- Too Soon: This trope has been blamed for the original Broadway production not running longer than it did (though its four-year run was a more than healthy one) and the failure of the 1986 West End transfer (which ran less than a year). In the mid-1980s, the AIDS crisis broke and had particularly devastating effects in the New York theatre community. Moreover, at this point the disease was thought to be exclusive to gays and drug needle sharers, and whenever the topic was being discussed in the news, this show — one of the few around, and certainly the only musical, that had gay characters — always seemed to be brought up. The thinking is that the negative connotations the show became saddled with pushed non-gay audiences away from it. (In the case of the West End version, though, opening just a few months before the original production of The Phantom of the Opera was probably a much bigger factor in its failure.)
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman