There have been duff movies, naff songs and hack telly – these things are easy to forget. But there’s something about an epic, vainglorious theatrical flop that won’t be shaken off. These are the grandiose, heroic follies, those once-seen, never-forgotten misfires that bring us in closer touch with theatre’s soul than many a more mediocre success.

Such a show was Orson Welles’s Around the World, a 1946 Broadway spectacular, based on Jules Verne’s novel, that united the Citizen Kane wunderkind with Cole Porter, a cast of 70 and four mechanical elephants. The show is revived for the first time next month as part of the semi-staged Lost Musicals season.

Around the World, says its director, Ian Marshall Fisher, was “Orson Welles’s mind coming to life”. The genre’s trademarks are a maverick ringmaster, overconfidence, control freakery and idiosyncratic vision, usually resulting in audience desertion and the loss of a small fortune, often of the auteur’s own money.

Let’s credit the template to the Emperor Nero, who would lock Roman citizens into theatres to witness his own performances (and compositions) as singer, actor and charioteer. Welles, of course, possessed an imperial ego, hence his seeming failure to understand that theatre is a collaborative art form.

“He could write, direct, act and produce,” Marshall Fisher says. “And he very much did what he wanted. He didn’t work for anybody.” He can’t think of a 21st-century equivalent but claims for Welles “the celebrity status and the abilities of Tom Cruise plus Madonna plus Ian McKellen plus Andrew Lloyd Webber plus Hal Prince plus Trevor Nunn”.

Around the World (or “Welles-a-poppin”, as it was dubbed) closed after 75 performances, losing Welles a reputed $320,000 in the process. New York was unprepared for this overblown hybrid in which vaudeville tomfoolery collided with the Broadway musical. US Marines swarmed the aisles of the Adelphi Theatre and, between circus interludes, a railway bridge collapsed onstage. Welles sacked one actor during previews because he fancied performing the role himself. But even his gargantuan charisma couldn’t rescue the show.

“Audiences presumably expected a musical,” Marshall Fisher says. But “this is not a musical. It is not a play. It is something quite different.” As one critic wrote: “It would be one hell of an entertainment if only it were more entertaining.”

Of course, to you and me a Welles and Porter show sounds like compulsive viewing. But we underestimate the extent to which, in 1946, Welles irritated people. Broadway resented his flight to Hollywood, and now resented his return, with his glamorous Tinseltown bride Rita Hayworth on his arm. Few trusted his self-publicising and his swagger (when critics complained that Around the World featured everything but the kitchen sink, Welles appeared with one onstage).

The visionary outsider, of which Welles is a prime example, reappears throughout the history of theatrical folly. Mike Batt was “an upstart record producer” (his own words) when he made a West End musical, starring Kenny Everett, out of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark. The show was eight years in development, and Batt’s music had already enjoyed success in concert and on record. The musical opened in 1991, with Batt as writer, composer, lyricist, director, occasional conductor of the 50-piece orchestra and deviser of its innovative computer-projection stage design. “Everything I have in terms of my spirit and soul is on the line,” he unwisely told the press beforehand. Because, as Welles’s experience suggested, theatre is wary of overweening arrivistes, especially ones best-known for writing The Wombles’ theme tune.

“A lot of the critics thought, ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’,” he says now. “The level of venom was something I’d never seen applied to anybody before. I was dragged through the dust by a cheering crowd of journalists to be hung, drawn and quartered.” When Snark closed after seven weeks, Batt had lost £600,000.

And yet one detects in the reviews of this legendary flop the near-exhilaration that such experiences can invoke. The Independent said that Snark was “conceived on such a mad, grandiose scale that it’s very nearly irresistible”. While we deplore the failure of such great theatrical miscarriages, we find ourselves admiring their fearless lack of inhibition.

I had the flabbergasting experience of watching Cliff Richard’s ill-conceived Heath-cliff musical, which showed the Wuthering Heights antihero on a gaudy, AOR world tour. Equally ill-starred was the RSC’s prize turkey Carrie, a blood-spattered musical based on the Stephen King novel (“It’s a simple little gig/ You help me kill a pig”) and the most expensive flop in Broadway history when it closed after five performances in 1988.

Could the new Around the World bring redemption? Orson Welles didn’t live to see his show revived. He probably didn’t care, Marshall Fisher says, because “if you are a superhuman being you don’t acknowledge failure”.

Around the World is on June 17, 24, and July 1, 8, at the Lilian Baylis, Sadler’s Wells (0844 4124300)

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