You've Read the Book, You've Seen the Film ... You've Missed the Show

It might not rank on the list of the Top 5 Broadway Flops, but it comes close.

Last Thursday the stage adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity opened at one of the biggest theatres on Broadway. The story of a nerdishly dysfunctional record shop assistant, the hit novel had translated into a hit film. The hit stage musical, it seemed, was assured.

But on Tuesday, after just 14 performances, the show's producers announced that it was closing.

"The writing was on the wall," said the show's producer, Robyn Goodman. "The critics decided the material was not appropriate for a musical. Or maybe they just didn't like it."

Although critics were harsh, by Broadway standards, where a review can close a show overnight, they were benevolent. Their problem with the musical was that rather than being dreadful on an epic scale, it was simply dull.

"The performances aren't bad, but there is little in any of them to arrest the attention," wrote Ben Brantley in the New York Times.

"The show has no soul," concurred Variety's David Rooney. "It lacks charm, sincerity and heart."

With a top ticket price of $111 (£56), the 1,434-seat Imperial theatre on Broadway saw half-full houses during the show's short life. High Fidelity took just $280,000 in its first week of previews, against a budget of $10m.

The show is the latest in a string of pop music-inspired shows on Broadway to suffer an untimely demise. Last month the Bob Dylan-inspired dance musical The Times They Are A-Changin' closed after 28 performances. Last year Broadway musicals based on John Lennon and on Elvis Presley closed after a few weeks.

Some speculate that the pop musicals have flopped because they appeal to young heterosexual men, a group not renowned for its enthusiasm for Broadway musicals. High Fidelity, with its storyline of a rock-snob slacker unable to translate his passion for music to his love life, seemed to be targeted at a very small theatre-going public.

For the 2000 film version of High Fidelity director Stephen Frears successfully transferred the story to Chicago. In the film John Cusack played the Hornbyesque lead character, Rob, successfully demonstrating that list-compiling, geekiness and obnoxiousness were not exclusively British characteristics. The film was not harmed by the presence of a manic Jack Black as one of Rob's sidekicks.

But for the musical Rob was transplanted again, this time to Brooklyn. New York did not seem to sit well with Rob - all the travelling turning the Everyman into just another tourist.

But perhaps the biggest problem facing the musical was the soundtrack. While Hornby's book gloried in the music in his head - from the Kinks to Stiff Little Fingers via Aretha Franklin and Stereolab - the stage show had to make up its own tunes. For many critics those tunes, many of them overblown numbers demanded by the genre, were antithetical to the mood of the book, the sort of music that Rob would never play.

"The seeming credo of this production," wrote Brantley, "can be found early in its lyrics: 'Nothin's great, and nothin's new, but nothin' has its worth.'"