Bad trip: "Trainspotting" made history, the musical made a fool of itself
The West End is no stranger to flops, but the collapse of the "Trainspotting" musical is unprecedented. The production received scathing reviews and was forced to cancel its tour due to dismal ticket sales.
In the West End, they are accustomed to resounding failures, not just hits. "The Lord of the Rings – The Musical," for example, was an expensive and noisy flop in 2007. It was preceded by "Oscar Wilde" in 2004, which received the rare rating of zero stars in The Guardian — along with the assertion that "the most musical thing about this musical is the sound of Oscar Wilde turning in his grave at this disaster" — and closed after only one performance. "Viva Forever," the musical based on Spice Girls songs, left fans disappointed in 2013 and investors with a big hole in their pockets.
But a crash like that of "Trainspotting – The Musical" is not remembered even by the city's elders. "Trainspotting" received a weighted score of 1.9 stars out of five from critics, but the boos it received from all sides (the cliché they used most often was, of course, "train wreck") were deafening, and perhaps even helped erase the painful listening experience of the musical's songs themselves. Many millions went down the drain, and the tour around Britain, which was planned to span five months after the world premiere in London, was shamefully cancelled due to a minimal rate of advance bookings. It is doubly painful because Scotland in general and Edinburgh in particular, the city where the musical's plot takes place, gave it the cold shoulder and showed no interest in it.
The plot of Irvine Welsh's book, and the two films made from it, describe a group of young people addicted to hard drugs who sink into heroin, poverty, and crime on the streets of Edinburgh in the late 80s. The first film was released in 1996 and turned director Danny Boyle into a star and Ewan McGregor into a superstar. It was made on a meager budget of less than 3 million dollars, grossed about 17 million dollars in the US, and acquired the status of a cult film. The sequel, released in 2017, was received quite lukewarmly but grossed 42 million dollars.
The central question that bothered the critics was why drag this "dead horse," as some of them defined it, onto the stage in the first place. They accused Welsh, who himself signed off on the stage adaptation, of castrating the material, not adapting it to our times, and finding no theatrical or musical justification for it. Even the new songs he wrote were inserted poorly, alongside well-known songs from the original soundtrack like Lou Reed's "Perfect Day." Instead of being a rock opera like "Rent," the new and boring songs tend more towards pop-country, and it just doesn't work. The video projections in the show only evoke longing for the film, and the bad luck that haunted the production was evident even in rehearsals, when the lead actor Robbie Scott was injured and forced to retire, replaced by Lewis Kidd who was pulled from the ensemble.
The musical is playing in one of the most magnificent historical halls in the city, the Royal Haymarket, which contains about 890 seats. The sales situation is so desperate that many discount sites offer tickets at rock-bottom prices like 5 pounds — an amount that is actually the commission charged on free tickets distributed to fill seats. The owner of the theater is Len Blavatnik, who already knows what failure is, and yet, it is unpleasant.
