Arthur Hull is having the time of his life, and he wants you to know it. From the moment he takes the Spiegel Zelt stage, the joy is unfeigned – this is a performer who genuinely loves the material, the room, and the act of performance itself.
Hull, a Flying Fruit Fly Circus graduate who reached Adam Lambert’s Top 3 on The Voice Australia, brings that same unselfconscious delight to a show about musical theatre’s most magnificent disasters.
What lifts FLOP! above a jukebox-with-jokes is that Hull has developed a genuine analytical framework. He asks what the “missing ingredient” is that separates a flop from a success, and pursues that question with real intellectual purpose.
Even the greatest names aren’t immune: Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies retold the Phantom story in New York a decade later, stripped of the music that made its predecessor immortal; Elton John’s Tammy Faye found the wrong story for its considerable talents.
Lineage, Hull argues, guarantees nothing – as Grease 2 amply demonstrates, though I’ll confess a lingering soft spot for Let’s Do It for Our Country, which delighted me at a Midsumma Festival production back in 2011 and delighted me again here.
The curation signals genuine devotion. Hull tracked down a near-impossible-to-find bootleg of King Kong: The Musical, a production notable for the fact that its titular character never gets to sing.
Diana: The Musical receives three numbers – affectionate mockery rather than contempt, even as Hull notes it became the only musical in history to receive one-star reviews before it opened, having launched on Netflix during COVID. Hull maintains the distinction between mockery and homage throughout, and it is what keeps the show from curdling into snark.
Hull admits the premise stretches to include “songs I want to sing,” and that honesty is itself revealing. The choices are those he knows he can deliver well, which means the interpretations are confident and sometimes genuinely illuminating – but his selections are occasionally personal taste wearing critical clothing. After thirty-three years watching musical theatre, I noted moments where I’d have chosen differently.
Hull works the larger Spiegel Zelt by moving directly into the audience – he dissolved the barrier between performer and room, and the big space became intimate. A momentary bleed of sound from a neighbouring stage during the final number barely registered against the gravitational pull of his performance.
Hull is twenty years old, and FLOP! – already an Adelaide Fringe Best Emerging Artist winner and Edinburgh Best Entertainment recipient – keeps getting better because he keeps asking the same question the show asks of its subjects: what would make this even stronger?
FLOP! The Best Songs from the Worst Musicals
Spiegel Zelt at The Garden of Unearthly Delights, East Terrace, Adelaide
Performance: Thursday 26 February 2026
Season continues to 8 March 2026
Information and Bookings: www.adelaidefringe.com.au
Image: Arthur Hull (supplied)
Review: Daniel G. Taylor