When a new show doesn't do well on Broadway, it usually disappears forever. No one, after all, is eager to invest money in a flop. But there are exceptions. The 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along ran for 44 previews and 16 performances and if anyone but Stephen Sondheim had written its score, you'd probably never have heard of it again. In this case, all sorts of folks wanted to take a whack at revising its book and changing its staging and it's been revived more often than many huge Broadway hits.
Something similar happened with the 1974 musical Mack and Mabel with a score by Jerry Herman. Its Broadway run lasted five previews and a paltry 66 performances but it keeps getting revised and revived and revised and revived and revised and revived. Though none of these revisals were revived for long, Mr. Herman to his dying day insisted it was the best score he ever wrote — an amazing viewpoint from a guy who wrote the scores for Hello, Dolly!, La Cage aux Folles and a few other smash successes.
One of the things that is said to have kept it alive was, of all things, an ice skating demonstration. In '82, the award-winning skaters Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean performed at the World Figure Skating Competition with a routine set to the Entr'acte of the original Broadway production of Mack and Mabel. They won a gold medal and their performance, televised around the world, prompted a run on the cast album. People reportedly rushed to buy it because they liked the one number to which the duo had skated. (In the video below, it's identified as the Overture from the show but it was actually the Entr'acte, which is the secondary overture that opened Act Two.)
The sudden surge in album sales convinced any number of producers that Mack and Mabel was deserving of another try and, like I said, there have been many of them and there are probably more to come. Maybe one day one of them will even run for a while…