You don’t have to see it to believe it….

By contrast, the Independent reported on Saturday that another group had, the night before, been “asked by a manager to stop laughing at inappropriate moments because it was ‘distracting and upsetting’ the cast.”

It’s a great pity that we weren’t there last Tuesday, though, when it sounds like there was genuinely something to laugh about. The Sunday Telegraph’s Tim Walker - who snuck in that night, three days ahead of the official opening - reported yesterday, “I wouldn’t give this tosh a single star were it not for the fact that when Miss Dallimore and Mr Benedict sat on a table during Tuesday night’s performance, it collapsed beneath them. ‘You’ve put on a lot of weight,’ Miss Dallimore ad-libbed to Mr Benedict. Then Mr Graeme came out and, creasing up, asked how his pal ‘can justify breaking my furniture?’ For a few brief moments, the show seemed to come alive, and no wonder: the cast had departed from the script and Pat Garrett’s leaden direction.” (Michael Billington also wrote a Guardian blog on Friday relishing reports of what happened that night: “We all love stories of ghoulish mishaps… Most audiences are disaster-perverts. We almost crave that something will go wrong in order to see how actors will ad-lib their way out of trouble.”)

You’ve got to feel for the cast, four professional actors suddenly marooned in a musical that they were forced to keep afloat - though by opening night one of them, Jay Benedict, had apparently got his way out of the impending catastrophe by departing the show altogether. (A notice posted on the stairs on the way down to the stalls said the understudy was appearing, and an announcement was duly made before the show began, though programmes were not slipped; his own website states that he has “left the cast”, and his webmaster explains the circumstances: “Jay injured his knee in rehearsals. He’s recovering with the help of physiotherapy. He has, however, now left the production.”

You have to wonder, of course, how it could simply have come this far. As Dominic Maxwell also points out, “To have written and self-produced one West End fiasco may be regarded as misfortune; to have written and self-produced two looks like carelessness”; so its composer-producer John Robinson seems to be making a career of it. (And on the London Paper website today, Ben Dowell writes, “Robinson at least triumphantly achieves one rare first: he shows it is possible to produce something worse than his 2005 dud Behind the Iron Mask).

But if Robinson clearly has a self-belief that exceeds his own talents - and his programme biography insists that there could still be a future life for Behind the Iron Mask, too (“plans are now in progress to take a new production to New York”), while here’s one we can barely wait for: “The composer has also set to music every word of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, from which it is planned to produce “a concert version, a musical and a ballet” - what’s disconcerting, as I say my review for this paper, is “that serious theatre professionals (including an Oliver award winning lighting designer) should ever have collected around it to bring it to the stage, or that a West End theatre owner should have given it houseroom.”

It does none of them any credit whatsoever; it may offer (very) short-term employment, but the show actually devalues, as I go on to say, “the currency and climate of the West End to have allowed it there at all”.

But then, hilariously, Robinson’s co-lyricist and book writer Roberto Trippini already thinks he’s far above the rest of the West End. The Independent’s Rhoda Koenig tracked down a piece written by him, in which he points out that commercial musicals stick “closely to those musical and narrative formulas which have proven capable of attracting a steady flow of unadventurous but well-heeled customers.” As Rhoda goes on to point out “There seems little danger of anyone taking Too Close to the Sun for one of these”.

And while Tim Walker may have broken the critical embargo in going in as early as he did, but was rewarded by being the only critic to see Jay Benedict before his departure, at least he didn’t publish until after the official opening. Of course, there are no such restrictions in the blogosphere and bulletin boards, who have been reporting freely on the show throughout its preview period and which the Independent have duly quoted extensively from. But curiously one outlet stayed resolutely silent: even though the West End Whingers, who pride themselves on reviewing previews, had gone in as early as last Monday, their review didn’t appear till Saturday morning. It turns out that they had agreed to be silenced, in return for free tickets. At least they admit as much: “We’ve learned a valuable lesson. We flew too close to the sun; we got burned. We saw this on Monday having been given comps in return for a solemn promise to observe the embargo and wait until after Friday’s press night before publishing our review.”

Clearly, different rules apply in the blogosphere; but if you take the hospitality, you have to abide by the rules. I’m glad to see that they did. But it also meant that a valuable voice was stifled until the official critics had checked in, too. And now it has been announced that it will shutter on August 8, four weeks ahead of its originally scheduled close date of September 5. It will soon be gone; but it won’t be forgotten quite so quickly.