Frank Rich called it “the worst play I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage.” Douglas Watt from the New York Daily News said the play shouldn’t happen to a moose, and claimed – in his review – that he’d already forgotten how it ended. Clive Barnes in the New York Post said that it was “so indescribably bad that I do not intend to waste anyone’s time by describing it.” Not that any of these reviews, or any of the others, were all that necessary; by the time they were published, Moose Murders had already closed. The show had a single official performance, in bleak, cold February 1983, and survivors of it still talk about it in hushed tones, if they talk of it at all. (Seriously, read this.)

That said, MCC Theater brought back Carrie: The Musical this year, which by reputation and legend was probably, in its original 1988 staging, the second-biggest disaster in modern Broadway history, and the new version managed to get through forty-six performances at the Lortel, precisely forty more than the original. This is the season of rebirth, after all; to that end, why not see if the bomb of bombs can be resuscitated a little? This at least appears to be the thinking of the brave Beautiful Soup Theater Collective, which has announced plans to start its third season by digging Moose Murders out of its shallow grave and re-staging it this October, in a limited run at the SoHo Playhouse. (FULL ARTICLE: Andrew Gans, Playbill)