The Musicals Man : Broadway shows are Paul Lambert’s song and dance. And nothing thrills him like a big flop.

OK, they’ve got a song in their hearts. They’ve got happy feet. So somewhere in the foggy past, a bunch of folks mounted a Broadway musical. They sweated through a long gestation of writing, financing, casting, staging and rehearsing. Then finally, it was opening night and the whole crew stayed up after the curtain closed, chain-smoking and making nervous jokes until the early papers came out, and the negative reviews rolled in, damning the production to a short run and utter obscurity until the end of time.

Would it have helped these people to know that someday they would be making Paul Lambert a very happy man?

The 28-year-old is a fan and collector of musicals, with more than 1,500 cast albums and hundreds of posters, lobby cards, programs, music books and other lasting reminders of musicals past.

Lambert has nothing against success. Indeed, if he were to wake up to find he had become a stage character, it would be Sky Masterson in Lambert’s favorite show, “Guys and Dolls.”

“But what is really interesting to me is the flop musical,” he said. “Everybody has ‘South Pacific’ and ‘The Sound of Music’ in their collections. But flops are really interesting because so little is known about them and so little is left of them. Once they close, they’re forgotten, with nothing documented or lasting other than what little memorabilia there may be.”

Lambert’s legacy of losers includes such well-forgotten titles as “Grab Me a Gondola”; “Ankles Aweigh”; “Carrie, the Musical,” based, yes, on the Stephen King story; “Bring Back Birdie,” a sequel to “Bye Bye Birdie” and killed after four performances; “The Ballad of Johnny Pot,” starring a pre-”Kung Fu” David Carradine, and a London cast album of “Hello, Dolly!” with a female impersonator in the lead.

“Collectors go nuts for things like this,” Lambert enthused.

We spoke at his family’s Huntington Beach home, where much of his wreckage from the Great White Way resides. More is in a Long Beach apartment where he recently moved, while still more is in a storage unit.

His love of musicals began in childhood, when his grandparents would take him to the theater. The first show he saw was a stock production of “The Music Man” starring onetime “F-Troop” fixture Ken Berry. He was left with a somewhat more lasting impression when he saw Angela Lansbury in “Gypsy.” From then on, he was addicted.

“I didn’t necessarily understand them, but the music really caught my attention. Shows I saw then have a totally different impact on me today. Now you can understand what the author is trying to tell you, get all the political stuff you don’t understand as a kid,” he said.

In his teens, he also listened to the music his peers enjoyed but kept his show tune interest to himself.

“I learned you have to adapt to what everyone likes. There were some times I felt people wouldn’t understand this and felt I just shouldn’t talk about it, because it is kind of a strange little hobby I have. I don’t think I should be ashamed of it, but some of my closest friends don’t know about it,” he said.

As an adult, he found others who share his interest, but unfortunately now they’re competition, prowling through rare record shows for the same records Lambert seeks. He finds his items at the Pasadena City College record swap meet and other such gatherings, as well as collectors shops in Los Angeles and New York, and neighborhood swap meets and thrift shops.

He works as an apartment manager and as a waiter at a South Coast Plaza restaurant. Previously, he spent five years working with the Long Beach Civic Light Opera, where he made many of his collecting contacts.

Though he has some of the rarest albums in the genre, he has never paid over $50 for a record. “I’m not so obsessed that I’ll spend a whole week’s pay on an album,” he said, though he does cumulatively have several thousand dollars invested in his collection.

Most likely his rarest album is “Parade,” an ill-fated musical by “Mame” and “Hello, Dolly!” composer Jerry Herman.

“When they issued this, Herman hadn’t written ‘Mame’ yet, and after it flopped, he had all the existing copies of this destroyed because he recycled a lot of music from this in ‘Mame’ and he didn’t want anyone to know that, so it’s a real collectors’ item,” Lambert said. It took him a decade to find his copy.

“Did you know they did a musical version of ‘Gone With the Wind’?” he asked, pulling out a Japanese cast album to prove it. Called “Scarlett,” the cast featured a Japanese Scarlett, Rhett and even Mammy, in blackface. The show eventually opened with an American cast in Los Angeles, where, Lambert was pleased to note, “it was a huge fiasco.”

Another rare loser in his collection is the cast album of “The Athenian Touch,” which did feature original “Gone With the Wind” cast member Butterfly McQueen, but in “a farcical romp in old Athens,” with such memorable songs as “No Garlic Tonight.” On the stage, the show never made it past opening night. Now the album from it is worth around $200.

Even winners are sometimes losers. Who, beyond Lambert and a few others, remembers Stephen Sondheim’s first musical, “Anyone Can Whistle,” which sank despite the presence of TV mainstay Harry Guardino? Sondheim’s cachet is such today that the album has been reissued on CD.

Alan Jay Lerner’s “Lolita, My Love,” probably won’t enjoy a digital resurrection, since it never even came out legitimately on record. It had been presumed the musical would follow Lerner’s “My Fair Lady” to success. Instead, his adaptation of Nabokov’s tale of nymphet love didn’t appeal to theatergoers, and it was never officially recorded for release. That didn’t keep Lambert from owning a copy of it.

“This is actually a bootleg album that somebody recorded from the sound system,” he said of his album with a makeshift cover. “Collectors are always happy to get something like this. There is definitely a strong bootleg Broadway videotape market where people sneak their video cameras into shows. It’s totally illegal, but they do exist. There’s the same thing with audio taping, and some of that comes out on records.”

Along with capturing the obscure efforts on the musical stage, Lambert thinks his collection offers a mirror history of its culture.

“It fascinates me the trends musical theater goes through according to its times. In the ‘40s and ‘50s everything seemed to be bright, and everyone went to the theater to feel good. Then it started getting darker in the ‘60s and in the ‘70s, really started to change after Kennedy’s assassination.

“I guess people looked at things differently, and musicals became more offbeat and serious, with a lot of experimentation. Then the ‘80s and ‘90s is kind of the Andrew Lloyd Webber era, where everything is just spectacle,” he said.

If Lambert had a time machine, he’d be gone, off catching the original production of “Gypsy” or Lucille Ball’s unsuccessful ‘60s Broadway incursion, “Wildcat.” As it is, he contents himself with traveling to New York at least every other year to keep abreast of the theater. That’s thin work today, he said.

“There was a time when you would have 20 to 40 shows opening every year. Now you’re lucky if you have two. The only new show opening Broadway lately is ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ and I already saw it here. Then they’re doing a revival of ‘Showboat.’ That’s what a slump they’re in now. And you have to pay almost $100 for a good seat. Andrew Lloyd Webber has made people expect these spectacles, and they have to put a high price on those.”

He’s not appalled by Webber’s creations, but he’s not crazy about them, either.

“I like them, but to me it’s a very manufactured type of theater. The people I talk to that see the shows say, ‘Oh, it’s great. The chandelier falls’ or ‘You should see what Norma’s mansion looks like.’ They never talk about the actors, story or music. That says a lot.”

Lambert writes songs and has done character or chorus parts in numerous local stage productions. His ultimate goal, though, is simply to own a shop to buy and trade more Broadway items.

He said, “I get a lot of pleasure out of it. I think if you have a hobby, it kind of keeps the world interesting. And when you’re in a slump, you can always turn to it and create your own world.”