Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Arthur Hull’s FLOP: The Best Songs From The Worst Musicals Ever Written
Arthur Hull
Genre: Cabaret, Comedy, Musical Theatre
Venue: Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Arthur Hull’s FLOP is a love letter to the biggest musical misfires to hit Broadway, the West End and other places. Well, a selection of misfires, given the plethora to choose from. Hull, a self-proclaimed musical theatre geek, aims to prove that every show can be proud of at least one song. Well, nearly every one.
Review
The old Pareto principle seems to apply to musicals, with an estimated 80% of those that stagger as far as the opening night failing to recoup the often considerable sums invested in them before the curtains even open. That makes for a lot of turkeys, but the premise of Arthur Hull’s FLOP or, to give it its full title, Arthur Hull’s FLOP: The Best Songs From The Worst Musicals Ever Written, is that there’s nearly always a nugget of gold buried somewhere in even the most disastrous, multi-million dollar disaster.
Flops occur for all manner of reasons – creative, commercial and the fact that the show was, ahem, just utter pish (as we say in Scotland) covers the bulk of those swiftly consigned to their theatrical grave. Hull sets out to prove his hypothesis in a captivating hour of full-on musical theatre, laced with tuneful songs that only a geek of the genre could have unearthed and several that, erm, would probably be best left forgotten.
It’s all action from the start as he launches into the opening workout-cum-dance sequence from Carrie The Musical that went a long way towards explaining why this turkey was roasted after just five shows.
However, Hull credits the vision and abundant talent of the creatives behind shows that bombed, stressing that his aim is to find the aforementioned gold nugget within the dross that caused the main event to sink, sometimes completely without trace in the case of King Kong, a show so bad that there’s not even a snippet to be found on the interweb. The moral here? Don’t make a musical where the lead ain’t going to do any warbling.
This whistlestop tour of the flops contains way too much material to cover here but mention must be made of the one show that Hull couldn’t resist tearing to shreds even more than the critics did – Diana, The Musical. Due to Covid, this was released on Netflix before it was first performed live, so, uniquely, got reviewed before it opened.
Badly too, struggling even to get one measly little star which is worse than bad in the modern age of starflation. Just one song was enough to convince everyone in the audience that the critics had called this one correctly as my kitch’ometer went into warp factor ten mode, the absurdity of thinking that this pile of poop would resonate with anyone becoming clear after about eight bars.
This is entertainment that comes highly recommended, whether you like music, musicals, theatre or just watching someone so evidently passionate about entertaining others go about his work. And, given that there are at least four flops out of every five shows that even make it as far as the opening night, Hull has a potential lifetime’s worth of material on which to build FLOP into a long running success.
Hull is a man of many talents too – raconteur, sharp comedian with great comic timing, impersonator, dancer and acrobat (he’s circus trained). But boy, can he sing. Possessing a range that must run darned close to three octaves, he has the vocal dexterity to deliver with power, tenderness and humour, breaking the fourth wall in this unforgiving lecture theatre to engage with his audience at every opportunity.
He could have just stood there and sung for an hour and got great ratings but he’s created a show that will, unlike the subject matter it addresses, live long in the memory for all the right reasons. Flop this is not. Arthur Hull is the real deal.
