Broadway’s Debacles Live On at Joe Allen’s ‘Flop Wall’

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at a wall of posters in a Manhattan restaurant that spotlights failed Broadway shows. We’ll also get details on a state senator who wants to take away Tesla’s right to operate five dealerships in New York.

There’s a place where Broadway flops live on: a wall at the restaurant Joe Allen in the theater district that is lined with posters of duds and disasters. “Everyone remembers the hits,” Joe Allen’s website says, “but we revel in the flops.” My colleague Sarah Bahr, who revels in both, writes about what it takes to make the flop wall:

Donald Margulies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of the 2000 drama “Dinner With Friends,” has a spot on the wall.

But it’s not that play that earned him that place.

It’s a show almost no one has heard of, a comedy called “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” that starred Faith Prince. It opened on Broadway on Dec. 8, 1994, and ran for just 12 performances.

A poster for that production is one of the more than 50 posters for little-known Broadway shows featured on what is known as the “flop wall,” the brick wall opposite the bar at Joe Allen. Among them are “Doctor Zhivago,” which ran for 23 performances a decade ago, and “Moose Murders,” which closed the same night it opened in 1983.

“Sometimes having a life in the theater is electrifying, and sometimes it is electrocuting,” Margulies said after a rehearsal for his latest play, “Lunar Eclipse,” which is set to begin performances Off Broadway next month.