Flop! The Best Songs from the Worst Musicals does exactly what it says on the tin. What the title doesn’t tell you, however, is that it’s a vehicle conceived by and featuring one of the brightest stars to emerge from the Southern Hemisphere, Arthur Hull.
This young Australian does it all. Singer. Dancer. Writer. Actor. Musician. Circus performer.
He appeared on the Australian version of The Voice in 2024, won the 2024 Australian National Busking Championship, earned Pick of the Melbourne Fringe for this very show, which he brought to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025, and is the recipient of the Adelaide Fringe Emerging Artist Award – and yet is barely into his twenties.
He’s so talented that he’d be easy to hate, were he not also unspeakably charismatic. We like Arthur Hull.
Fortunately, we also love the show, which he’ll be taking back to the Edinburgh Fringe for 22 performances in August before bringing it to London’s Wilton’s Music Hall in September.
This is the show every lover of musicals should see.
Every show needs an opening number, and after a preamble aimed at producers everywhere, who honestly never set out intending to produce a flop, we get the opening number from one of the most notorious flops in musical theatre history, Carrie.
Based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, the Gore, Pitchford and Cohen musical managed 16 previews and just five performances before it closed. On the strength of this opening number, it’s actually fairly easy to see why.
Next up, however, comes one of the greatest songs from the Great American Songbook: Rodgers and Hart’s My Funny Valentine from Babes in Arms, the show that also gave us – though it isn’t included here – The Lady Is a Tramp. Hull plays a mean jazz piano, too.
Coming back to the UK is a rare misfire from producer Cameron Mackintosh: It’s a Whale of a Tale from Longden and Kaye’s Moby Dick. Oddly, it is by no means the only musical theatre adaptation of Melville’s classic, something that also applies to the next numbers. Sticking with the oversized-animal theme, we’re treated to a couple of songs from King Kong.
The songs then come thick and fast with A Girl’s Gotta Do from the short-lived 2012 flop Scandalous, followed by an Elton John number from Tammy Faye. Hull clearly loves Elton John and Billy Joel, and plays with the energy and gusto of both, before taking a more operatic turn with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s misconceived follow-up to The Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies. Here, Hull demonstrates that, if he wanted to, he could easily become a West End leading man, young though he is.
We then cycle through Grease 2 (a terrible idea), Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (which holds the record for 183 previews before finally opening and reportedly lost around $60 million of its $75 million budget), and Diana: The Musical, before Hull somehow manages to squeeze in a song from Tom Hooper’s cinematic car crash, Cats, on the basis that it comes from the film rather than the beloved long-running stage show.
A penultimate zinger from The Fields of Ambrosia, a show that managed just 23 performances at the Aldwych Theatre in 1996, almost justifies including the final number: The King of Broadway from Mel Brooks’ worldwide smash hit The Producers, which Hull clearly relishes performing.
If I have one suggestion for young Mr Hull, it’s simply this: trust yourself. I was barely ten feet away from you and knew you could have filled the theatre without a microphone. There’s no need to push quite so hard. Enjoy the journey, because you’ve got an extraordinary career ahead of you. You’re the real deal, mate. The real deal.
Venue: Phoenix Arts Club, London
Book, Music, & Lyrics: Various
Conceived by and Starring Arthur Hull
Dates: 6th – 30th August, Gilded Balloon Edinburgh
Running time: 65 minutes, no interval
Date Seen: Wednesday 21st July 2026
Photo credit Jasper Wood