The notice did provide, however, for the show to remain open on nights that feature a full moon.



Marking the debut of Warner Brothers in the theater venue, where it had hoped to further lower unrealistic hopes for intellectual excellence on the boards, while making as much moola as Disney, the fiasco came back to haunt the company as a $12-million guzzle of red ink.

With music and lyrics by the long-time-no-inspiration duo of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, who somehow could bring themselves to attempt yet one more musicalization of the haunts of those absurd creatures, we can now consider the show almost dead.

By the way, it's when observing the persistent life of such absurdities that we remind ourselves only creatures with an evolutionary basis and an elaborate biological support system do in fact exist and that, consequently, all the monsters who haunted us in our childhood were actually no more than phantasms of the some Hollywood creep's imagination, devised especially to haunt us out of the price of admission.