Feb. 22, 1983: A night that will live in Broadway infamy.
It was the night a 28-year-old writer named Arthur Bicknell opened his first (and last) Broadway play, a mystery-farce called “Moose Murders.” Previews had been . . . well, “rocky” doesn’t do them justice. Better to use Bicknell’s own description: “an amazing stew of magnificent incompetence.”
The leading lady quit, a man sitting alongside the critics at a matinee vomited all over himself and a woman leaving the theater one night shouted to a policeman, “Arrest this play!”
On opening night, Bicknell awaited the reviews at Sardi’s, where he sensed the show hadn’t gone over well, especially since the “semi-celebrities” at the party declined to meet him.
(“They ate the food, though,” he recalls.)
But nothing prepared him for the reviews, which came like bullets from a machine gun:
“If your name is Arthur Bicknell, change it.” — Dennis
Cunningham, WCBS.
“So indescribably bad that I do not intend to waste anyone’s time by describing it.” — Clive Barnes, the New York Post
“I will not identify the cast pending notification of next of kin.” — Associated Press.
“A visit to ‘Moose Murders’ will separate the connoisseurs of Broadway disaster from mere dilettantes for many moons to come.” — Frank Rich, the New York Times.
“Moose Murders” closed that night, and instantly became the yardstick by which all Broadway fiascos would be measured.
(In one scene, a mummified paraplegic jumped out of his wheelchair and kicked a man in a moose costume. There is no point asking why.)
“I kept thinking it would blow over,” Bicknell tells me. “It wasn’t the only bad play ever written.
“I thought that for weeks and months and years. And then in 2000, AARP magazine listed the biggest flops of the 20th century, and ‘Moose Murders’ was right up there with the Edsel and New Coke.”
To mark the 30th anniversary of this landmark of American theater, “Moose Murders” is being revived by off-Broadway’s The Beautiful Soup Theater Collective, beginning Jan. 29. It will be directed by Steven McCasland, founder of The Beautiful Soup, and “shamelessly revised” by Bicknell himself.
Revised? Is this because he doesn’t think he got it right the first time?
“Well, me and a few other million people,” he says, with a laugh.
“When Steven came to me with the idea of directing the play, he asked some very innocent questions — such as, ‘Who killed so and so in this scene?’ One would think that I, as the author of this murder mystery, would be able to answer that question. But I couldn’t. I don’t think I ever could. I didn’t think it was important at the time. So I sat down and started to plot out the play — to make sure I knew whodunnit. It’s amazing how much easier it is when you actually do the work!”
“Moose Murders” shares a bizarre kinship with Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy.” Both were inspired by the 1906 murder of Grace Brown and her unborn baby by her lover, Chester Gillette. Dreiser followed Gillette’s trial, and Bicknell’s family had a house on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, right near Punky Bay, where Brown was drowned.
“Everything up there is called ‘Moose,’ and that’s where the title came from. I wanted to write a farce and ‘Moose’ is a funny word.”
After “Moose Murders” crashed and burned, its producers — a Texas couple, rich from oil wells — hopped the Concorde to Paris. But Bicknell’s theater career was over. He went back to his old job as a reservations clerk for Air France, and then worked as a literary agent. He ended up as a publicist for Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Mass.
Not long ago, he returned to his hometown of Ithaca to work on a memoir called “Moose Murdered: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb,” to be published later this year.
He also formed a small theater company in Ithaca, the Homecoming Players.
“I’m back in the saddle again,” Bicknell says, “so it’s only fitting that ‘Moose Murders’ should rear its . . . antlers.
“Here’s hoping it goes better this time around. How can it not?”