Musical Misfires: Three Decades of Broadway Musical Heartbreak

What does a Broadway show “feel” like? Obviously, it depends on your age and your experience with musicals. For one person, a top-notch revival of My Fair Lady has the ideal Broadway feeling. For others, an exciting new musical like Dear Evan Hansen is what gives them a Broadway buzz. Sometimes a musical opens that is different enough that it doesn’t “feel” like Broadway to most theatregoers. Perhaps the show doesn’t satisfy the way one expects. Or maybe it is outside the Broadway box and some audiences are uncomfortable with it. This chapter looks at five unique musicals that strayed outside that box. Doing so made them special but it also made it difficult to find a long-term audience.

Graciela Daniele, the acclaimed Argentine-born artist who has directed and/or choreographed such memorable musicals as The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Once on this Island, Ragtime and the revivals of Annie Get Your Gun and Pal Joey, has twice presented dance musicals on Broadway and on both occasions audiences were not interested. Her Dangerous Games, a double bill of two very different dance pieces, ran only 4 performances in 1989. Undeterred, Graciela returned six years later with an even more ambitious project: a dance version of Gabriel García Márquez’s 1981 novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold. First published in English in 1983, the novella takes a journalistic point of view of a family revenge story. After Bayardo marries Angela, he finds out she is not a virgin and he drags her back to her family home where her mother beats the truth out of her: Angela made love with the landowner Santiago. Angela’s twin brothers Pablo and Pedro announce that they will get revenge on this smear on their family’s honor by killing Santiago. Although everyone in the village, including the priest, knows about the vendetta, they are helpless to stop it and Santiago is brutally murdered with twenty knife wounds. Angela’s family moves out of the village but for seventeen years Angela writes letters of forgiveness and love to Bayardo. He never opens them but when Angela returns to the town, he finally forgives her.

Loosely based on an event that happened to Marquez’s own family in Columbia, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a powerful tale steeped in Latin American tradition. There was a Italian-French-Columbian film version of the story made in 1987 with an international cast but the dialogue was in Spanish. The 1995 dance version of Chronicle of a Death Foretold was written by Daniele and Jim Lewis with some additional lyric help by Michael John LaChiusa. They made some major changes to the original novella, such as having Angela wrongly accused of pre-marital sexual relations and making Santiago a close friend of the two vengeful brothers. But the basic idea of blood honor was still central to the musical. While most of the story was told through dance, there was some dialogue and three songs. Bob Telson, the eclectic composer of world music, film, and theatre, wrote the score for Chronicle of a Death Foretold and used not only the expected Latin music but also native sounds of South America and even African themes. As in much of Daniele’s work in dance and theatre, the tango is a pivotal form of expression, more often used as an expression of grief and mourning than celebration.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold opened on June 15, 1995, at the Plymouth Theatre, a mid-sized Broadway playhouse, but was produced by Lincoln Center Theatre as part of its New Collaboration Series. The reviews were mixed, most critics finding the staging of the tale, the individual dancers, and the music thrilling. At the same time, few reviewers thought Chronicle of a Death Foretold was satisfying as musical theatre and felt it was primarily a dance concert. The program ran only eighty intermission-less minutes and that also added to many critics’ and playgoers’ disappointment. Even with notices proclaiming that the show was “frequently stunning” and “smart, surrealistic and entrancing,” it was difficult to interest mainstream Broadway audiences. Lincoln Center knew such an experiment was unlikely to run very long but even they were disheartened when they had to close Chronicle of a Death Foretold inside of five weeks. The production was nominated for three Tony Awards: Best Musical, Best Choreography and Best Book of a Musical, winning none of them. Unfortunately, Telson’s music was not cited; even sadder, it was never recorded.

Following their Pulitzer Prize/Tony Award-winning success Next to Normal (2008), composer Tom Kitt and librettist-lyricist Brian Yorkey went in a very different direction with If/Then. While the former musical had an oppressive rock score that paralleled the main character’s mental illness, If/Then offers a more conventional set of songs about a heroine who is not only sane but is ever hopeful. What is not conventional about the show is Yorkey’s original libretto which might be described as a double musical. Thirty-eight-year-old Elizabeth, a teacher of city planning in Phoenix, gets a divorce and returns to New York City after twelve years and plans to start her life anew. In Madison Square Park, she is reunited with an old college friend, Lucas, who was once her lover but now states he is bisexual. Elizabeth also meets her new neighbor, the schoolteacher Kate, who insists that Elizabeth’s new life calls for a new name so she calls her Liz. Kate suggests the two of them go and listen to a handsome guy playing guitar on the other side of the park. Lucas, who still calls her Beth from their college days, is a city planner and offers to take her to meet some people in the field and help her make useful connections. Faced with this simple decision, Elizabeth’s choice will lead her down two very different paths. If/Then explores the outcomes of both possibilities.

Elizabeth’s decides to go with Kate to hear the musician. On the way “Liz” meets the Army doctor Josh who she starts dating and eventually they have a love affair which ends up with her pregnant. Josh and Liz wed and have two children before he is sent overseas on a tour of duty and is killed in action. In this version of the story, Lucas connects with the gay doctor David, the couple eventually adopting a child, and Kate weds her long-time girlfriend Anne. It is David who helps Liz get over the loss of her husband and it is an old friend Stephen, who works in city planning, who offers Liz a job in his office, thereby giving her another new start. The alternative version shows what happens to “Beth” when Lucas takes her to meet fellow city planners who are protesting a new building development. This brings her in contact with Stephen, someone she knew in grad school, who offers her a job in the city planning office. Lucas still loves Beth and the two have been sleeping together, so he is very jealous when Beth takes the job. After working closely together for some time, Beth and Stephen have a brief affair which she breaks off, afraid it will jeopardize her job. Finding out she is pregnant by Lucas, Beth has an abortion. When Lucas finds out, he is furious and breaks off their friendship and not until two years later are they reconciled. In this version Kate and Anne have marital problems and consider a divorce, and Elena, Beth’s protege at work, quits to get married and have children. This forces Beth to look back on the decisions she has made. The musical ends with Elizabeth and her friends back in Madison Square Park. She has decided to run for city council and start her life anew. When a stranger, the Army doctor Josh, comes up to her and offers to share a cup of coffee together, she agrees. As if this is not confusing enough, both versions of the story were told simultaneously, scenes going back and forth with sometimes the only hint for the audience being that Liz always wore glasses.

The score for If/Then is contemporary Broadway with slight variations, such as light rock for the activists’ “Ain’t No Man Manhattan” and rhythm and blues in Kate’s “It’s a Sign.” There are plenty of high-powered pop ballads for Elizabeth, such as “What If?,” “What the Fuck?” and “Always Starting Over, and for other characters, as with Lucas’ “You Don’t Need to Love Me.” There’s a touch of folk-rock in Liz and Josh’s duet “Here I Go” and Beth’s “You Learn to Live Without.” Among the quieter, most heartfelt numbers are Josh’s tentative serenade to Liz, “You Never Know”; his nervous love song to his newborn son, “Hey, Kid”; Lucas and Beth’s flowing duet “Some Other Me”; and David’s torchy “What Would You Do?” It is a character-driven score with thought-provoking lyrics. If there is a weakness here, it is in having too many characters delivering reflective songs. After a while there is a sense of repetition and one longs for more variety. Most of the score is comprised of solos and duets and they all have something worth saying. But some might feel there is a limit to how much introspection one wants in one (or, in this case, two) musicals. Also one has to consider that If/Then was a vehicle for Idina Menzel in her first Broadway appearance since finding stardom in Wicked (2003). She was involved with the project from its first lab production in 2013 and the songs for Elizabeth are definitely in Menzel’s full-voiced, expressive style. Kitt and Yorkey must have known Menzel would be the musical’s draw on Broadway and, not wishing to disappoint her fans, gave her five solos, three duets, and significant sections in several other numbers. Call her Elizabeth, Liz, or Beth, it was all Menzel and it was a workhorse of a performance.

If/Then was staged by Michael Greif who had directed Menzel in Rent. Also in the cast from Rent was Anthony Rapp as Lucas. Menzel may have had most of the songs but this was no one-woman show and her supporting cast was first-rate. In addition to Rapp was LaChanze (Kate), James Snyder (Josh), Jerry Dixon (Stephen), Jenn Colella (Anne), Jason Tam (David), and Tamika Lawrence (Elena). Each had a moment to shine and they did. As much as the critics hailed Menzel’s dynamic performance, they did not fail to applaud these other performers as well, some commentators stating If/Then had the most impressive cast on Broadway. The musical itself met with mixed notices when it opened on March 30, 2014. Several reviews complimented the score, finding it a refreshing contrast to that of Next to Normal, but few found favor with the libretto. Complaints centered on the way the two stories weakened one’s empathy for the characters. Which version is true? How does one mourn the death of Josh if we are later told that it never happened? Is it possible to get caught up in a relationship that exists in only one version of the story? These questions, and others, were asked by the press and, unable to answer them, most reviews ended up recommending Menzel and company but not If/Then. Yet the show had a large advance because of Menzel and the raves in the media about her performance translated into sell-out houses for the first few months. Menzel was nominated by the Tony committee for Best Actress and the score was also nominated but neither won. By the end of summer, either Menzel’s fan base had seen the show or interest in the musical flagged and the large Richard Rodgers Theatre had plenty of empty seats. When If/Then closed after 401 performances, it was not listed in the profit column. A national tour, headed by Menzel, did very well so investors most likely saw some return on their money. In the past, a major star could keep a poorly-reviewed Broadway musical running long enough to break even at least. Menzel was a trouper and stayed with If/Then for its entire run, knowing that the producers would have difficulty keeping the show running if she left it. Such is the economics of Broadway that star power is just not powerful enough.

The Last Ship, a musical scored by the very popular pop-rock singer-songwriter Sting, did not come together in the way a Broadway musical usually does. Sting grew up in the ship-building town of Wallsend in Northumberland, England, where he was educated and played jazz as a young man. His professional career took off with the new wave band The Police before finding fame as a single artist, winning international acclaim and numerous awards. Yet Sting always felt connected to his hometown and in the 1990s he returned to his roots, musically speaking, and started writing songs about his childhood and the shipbuilders in Northumberland. These songs were more in the English folk style of the region rather than the rock format he was known for. Some of them appeared on his albums in the 1990s and in the new century and soon he had a full song cycle that had possibilities as a musical theatre piece. Lorne Campbell fashioned some of the songs into a plot and Sting wrote new ones for a musical titled The Last Ship, named after one of the songs. It was given a reading in New York in 2011 and another in Newcastle in 2012. The first production was in Chicago in 2014 with a revised script by John Logan and Brian Yorkey and directed by Joe Mantello. After more changes, The Last Ship opened on Broadway on October 26, 2014. Since the musical had no specific source material and was built on Sting’s memories of Northumberland, the libretto was always the difficulty. The story changed from the early readings to the Broadway version to a later revised script which toured Great Britain and Ireland in 2018. What New Yorkers saw in 2014 was a romantic tale set in the seaside city of Wellsend where the only employment is shipbuilding. Teenager Gideon Fletcher is expected by his father Joe to work as a riveter in “the yards” like he and his father before him did. But Gideon wants to escape from Wellsend and, even after Joe is wounded in an industrial accident and forced to retire, he refuses to take his father’s place and become a riveter. Gideon and the young Meg are in love and he begs her to sail away with him to see the world. She is torn with indecision then decides to stay where she belongs so Gideon leaves without her. Sixteen years later, an adult and somewhat jaded Gideon returns to Wellsend when he hears his father has died and he needs to clear up his affairs. Meg has a sixteen-year-old son Tom but she has never married even though Arthur Millburn loves her and has proposed to her more than once. Gideon finds Wellsend a desolate place, the shipyards having closed and unemployment high. He tells Meg he still loves her and again asks her (and their son) to go away with him. Meg cannot decide between her love for the romantic, wild Gideon and the stable, constant Arthur. The local priest Father O’Brien rouses the out-of-work men to come together to build one last ship which they will use to sail to “the island of souls.” The whole city gets behind the project and even Gideon works on the ship. But when Meg tells him she will marry Arthur because he loves who she is while Gideon loves who she once was, Gideon wants to abandon the building of the ship and leave town. It takes his teenage son Tom to convince Gideon to face up to life and, with his years of experience at sea, to captain the last ship.

It was a passionate story filled with complex relationships and socio-political issues but there were several holes in the plot and even the logic was suspect. But the characters were vivid and Sting’s score was exciting. He described the music as including “Northumberland folk music, the Celtic reel, the rock ballad, the rhumba and the Bossa nova.” There were some powerful ballads, such as Gideon’s “All This Time,” “August Winds” for the young and adult Meg, and Arthur’s “What Say You, Meg?” The stirring duets included “When We Dance” and “It’s Not the Same Moon” for Gideon and Meg, the wry “So to Speak” for Fr. O’Brien and Gideon, and the bitter “Dead Man’s Boots” sung by Gideon and his deceased father. Yet in some ways the score’s most penetrating numbers were the choral ones, some of which told a story, as with “Island of Souls,” “We’ve Got Now’t Else,” and the title song. The Broadway cast recording is deemed more satisfying than the actual production because it is a radiant song cycle.

The Broadway reviews varied greatly, some finding the musical thrilling, moving, and potent. The naysayers were not vicious in their criticism but felt the plot went in too many directions at once and lacked focus. There was general applause for the masterful cast led by Michael Esper (Adult Gideon) and Rachel Tucker (Adult Meg) and for Joe Mantello’s dynamic staging of the men as they seemed to be trapped insides the skeletal ship designed by David Zinn and lit so dramatically by Christopher Akerlind. But the element that most impressed the press was Sting’s score. Some of the songs were already familiar to the reviewers from previous recordings and they were declared even better on second hearing. (Sting’s score and Rob Mathes’ orchestration were the only Tony nominations the show received.) Despite the popularity of Sting, The Last Ship was a hard sell on Broadway because the subject matter was of little interest to Americans and word was out that the music was not what Sting fans were expecting. To beef up sales, Sting himself joined the cast as the foreman Jackie White for a time but it was an uphill battle to keep The Last Ship on the boards. It closed after three months, losing its entire $15 million investment. But Sting and the show’s other creators have not given up on the musical. A revised version played in Salt Lake City in 2016, a tour in Britain and Ireland in 2018 featured more changes, a Toronto run in 2019 was well received, and a national tour of the States is planned. We have not heard the last of The Last Ship.

Country music hasn’t exactly been the most popular musical style choice when it comes to writing Broadway musical scores, though there have been occasional successes where the genre is concerned, including Shenandoah, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and Big River. There is something about the sound of country’s twang that feels more at home in Branson, Missouri, than on the Broadway stage. The sub-genre of Kentucky bluegrass music has proven an even more esoteric choice for musicals, so its sound has rarely found its way to the Great White Way. Film comedian and playwright Steve Martin, however, had always had a penchant for the bluegrass sound, as well as a talent for composing and playing it. It was this love for banjos, fiddles, and the other musical sounds of Appalachia that led to his collaborating with Edie Brickhill to write the Broadway musical Bright Star. The two had previously worked together on the Grammy-winning 2013 bluegrass album Love Has Come for You which included the turn-of-the-century folk song “Iron Mountain Baby.” That ballad, about a discarded infant found along the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railways tracks, was the inspiration for writing Bright Star.

Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in 1946, Bright Star is told from the point of view of Alice Murphy (Carmen Cusack), a newspaper editor who has decided, after having made a career of telling other people’s stories, she will now tell her own. Flashing back one-year, we meet Billy Cane (A.J. Shively), an aspiring young writer from the small town of Hayes Creek who has just returned from the war. He reunites with his father and his childhood friend Margo (Hannah Elless) who carries a flame for Billy. Billy learns that his mother has passed away, but soldiers on, submitting some of his writing to the The Asheville Southern Journal. This is where his path converges with Alice, who likes the young man’s pluck and offers him a job. Alice then takes the audience back to 1923, to Zebulon, North Carolina, her hometown. She is sixteen and flirting with Jimmy Ray Dobbs (Paul Alexander Nolan), the son of the town’s mayor (Michael Mulheren). Her parents (Stephen Lee Anderson and Dee Hoty) and Mayor Dobbs are both opposed to the young couple seeing each other, preferring they both focus on preparing themselves for successful futures. Returning to 1945, Billy leaves Hayes Creek and moves to Asheville, choosing his career over the young woman (much to Margo’s dismay). In 1923, Alice and Jimmy Ray are still romantically involved. Alice learns she is pregnant with Jimmy Ray’s child. Mayor Dobbs arranges for Alice to give birth in a secluded cabin, then takes the baby under the pretense that he’s putting it up for adoption, places the child in a valise, and throws him off the train and into the river near Hayes Creek. Alice is heartbroken over giving up her baby, but her family pushes her to attend college at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1924. She still hasn’t forgotten her little boy. Jimmy Ray’s father confesses to his son what he really did with the baby. Billy Ray cannot bring himself to tell Alice the truth and cancels a trip to visit her at school. It is 1945 again and Margo is missing Billy, sharing with her friends how she had hoped to marry him. Alice transports us again to 1946 where Daryl (Jeff Blumenkrantz) and Lucy (Emily Padgett), Alice’s other employees at the paper, take a struggling Billy out for a drink. Lucy and Billy share in a drunken kiss. The following day, Alice tells Billy that the paper will publish one of his stories. He has been writing tales based on his hometown of Hayes Creek and invites Alice to come see the place. Alice, who has planned a trip to Raleigh, agrees to stop in Hayes Creek on her way home. While in Raleigh, Alice researches her baby’s adoption, but learns nothing until she has a reunion with Jimmy Ray who confesses what his father had done. In Hayes Creek, Billy realizes that Margo is the girl for him and decides that he will move home. Alice, returning from Raleigh, first stops in Zebulon where her father apologizes for allowing Mayor Dobbs to take her baby. Alice’s next stop is Hayes Creek where she sees Billy’s childhood home, recognizing a sweater amongst his possessions that once belonged to her. Billy is, of course, Alice’s long lost child. His adoptive parents tell him the story of how he had been found in the river wrapped in the familiar garment. At first he is shocked and hurt, but he ultimately accepts Alice as his mother. Alice introduces her son to his birth father Jimmy Ray, a family reunited after circumstances that tragically tore them apart.

Workshopped by the New York Stage and Film at the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College in July of 2013, Bright Star received its premiere production at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, on September 28, 2014. After a year’s hiatus for further shaping, the musical reemerged at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on December 2, 2015. From there, the show was fast-tracked for Broadway, opening at the Cort Theatre on March 24, 2016. Under the direction of Walter Bobbie, and with choreography by Josh Rhodes, the musical received mostly positive reviews. Martin’s and Brickhill’s score was celebrated for its lively vibrancy and potent lyrics, though critics did mention that “a little bluegrass went a long way,” wearing out its welcome after a while. Actress Carmen Cusack, in the role of Alice Murphy, was singled-out as one of the season’s break-out performances. Eugene Lee’s homespun-inspired set design was also lauded, particularly for both its versatility and for a cabin on a revolve that housed the musicians (which included guitar, mandolin, banjo, violin, viola, fiddle, accordion, piano, drums, and autoharp players). Bright Star’s book was received more coolly, with some critics finding its plot twists more convenient than inspired. Yet, most of the reviewers found Alice to be a mesmerizing character and enough to keep the audiences invested. The chief recurring complaint, however, was that the musical sometimes got too big for what amounted to a quaint story that required less flash and more intimacy.

Of the many memorable numbers in the score, there were several standouts. The opening ditty “If You Knew My Story” introduces us to Alice Murphy and the tale she has to tell. Starting out slow and reflective, the strings of the banjos take over and the song evolves into a lively chorus number. The emotionally resonant “Asheville” boasts a haunting melody and lyrics of palpable heartbreak as sung by Margo as she comes to terms with Billy choosing his writing career over her. Billy sings the musical’s title song, a hopeful, determined number about keeping a promise to himself to always follow his own “bright star” despite what he has to leave behind. “I Had a Vision,” a soaring duet ballad for Alice and Jimmy, each recalling how they respectively saw their lives turning out, is reprised with a hymn-like majesty for Bright Star’s finale. Regardless of whether or not you like the country-flavored sound, Martin and Brickhill understood the ingredients of good musical theatre storytelling and that is what shined through in Bright Star. A number of the songs from Bright Star had already appeared on Brickell & Martin’s 2015 album “So Familiar,” and the song “Asheville” was recorded by Brickell in 2013 on the album “Love Has Come For You.”

Due to audience skepticism over seeing a show with a bluegrass score, as well as the fact that Bright Star was totally eclipsed that season by the arrival of the Tony Award-winning phenomenon Hamilton, what might have been a modest hit became an also-ran. Bright Star, though nominated for five Tony Awards including Best Musical, didn’t take home any trophies and the show closed after 109 performances. What was a unique offering in a busy season on Broadway may have been too out-of-the-box to remain ensconced there. This is a shame because there was much to admire and recommend about Bright Star. The good news is that Bright Star is enjoying a healthy life in regional theatres where it will undoubtedly continue to find audiences who will warm to its unconventional charms.

In Transit claims to be the first entirely a cappella musical on Broadway. That may be so but performing without a pit band is just one of the unique aspects of this perky little show that tried (perhaps too hard) to turn average New Yorkers into fascinating characters. Most musicals are written – book, music and lyrics – but In Transit was “developed,” that catch-all word for shows like A Chorus Line that came out of a group mind. The group in this case consisted of Kristen Anderson-Lopez, James-Allen Ford, Russ Kaplan, and Sara Wordsworth who started with an idea – New Yorkers going to and taking the subway – and then all four contributed to the book, music, and lyrics during a long (twelve years) series of readings, workshops, concerts, and Off-Broadway productions. What opened on Broadway in 2016 was a character collage. A dozen people using the subway each have a story, some of which overlap with other riders’ stories. The cast of characters is supposedly a cross section of New Yorkers who use the subway. In case you can’t guess them, they include a struggling actress and her agent, a gay couple, a failed Wall Street broker and his still-employed friend, a struggling medical student and his out-of-town girlfriend, two doctors (male and female), and an office temp who lives for the nightlife. The spokesman for all of the NewYorkers is the lively Boxman, a street performer who raps, reads poetry, and is actually interesting. There is no plot but several of the stories aim for some kind of resolution or at least a turning point.

The a cappella songs are polished and intricate. Some of the authors were veterans of the TV series Glee and the Pitch Perfect movies so they knew what they were doing. One did not miss a band or orchestra because the singers often provided instrumental sounds. In small doses, this is very impressive and pleasing. But a full evening of this kind of music left some playgoers weary and the songs themselves, though spirited, rarely went anywhere. Ironically, several songs celebrated the “journey” over the “destination” and, for anyone who has had to spend a good deal of their life on a subway, this kind of optimism quickly gets cloying. The would-be actress sings the rousing “Getting There” as the finale when “Getting Out of Here” seems more appropriate. More interestingly, the cast sings “Deep Beneath the City” as a cacophony of the different characters’ thoughts, the ex-Wall Streeter has the lament “Broke,” the gay couple pronounce their love for each other with the duet “We Are Home,” the token booth operator sings the uplifting “Keep It Goin’,” the actress’s agent Mrs. Williams breaks into the up-tempo gospel number “A Little Friendly Advice,” and a gay man tries to tell his mother the truth about himself in “Choosing Not to Know.” There is variety in the score but with every song backed by vocal harmonizing it all starts to blend together.

Titled Along the Way, the musical was originally about seven New Yorkers when it was first performed for the public at a reading at the New York Music Theatre Festival in 2004. After a five-performance concert run Off-Broadway at the York Theatre, it received a workshop production at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut in 2008. Two years later, and now titled In Transit, the musical was given an Off-Broadway mounting by the Primary Stages. By the time it arrived on Broadway on November 10, 2016, the cast included a dozen characters and some different songs. Kathleen Marshall (replacing Joe Calarco) directed and choreographed with James-Allen Ford and Russ Kaplan in charge of the a cappella arrangements. The producers wisely booked In Transit in the small, intimate Circle in the Square Theatre with the audience seated on three sides of the action. Scenic designer Donyale Werle used the long narrow stage to recreate a subway station with a moving treadmill down the center to bring actors, scenery, and props on and off the stage. The cast was highly trained in a cappella singing but the acting was also very strong. The reviews were mixed with most critics finding something encouraging to say about the singing, the performers, and Marshall’s creative staging. While some notices were enthusiastic and highly recommended In Transit, others did not think it worth the subway trip to the Theatre District to see it. The most repeated comment was that the show was enjoyable but not very memorable. In Transit managed to fill the small venue for several weeks, especially during the holiday season, then struggled to run into April when it closed after 145 performances. With the ever-growing interest in a cappella singing across the nation, it is likely that In Transit will see a considerable number of regional productions in the future.