Today’s American Idol news full of sweet, sweet schadenfreude comes from the Big Apple, where Idol: The Musical closed Monday night after its first and, mercifully, only performance. The musical had an out-of-town run in Syracuse and had been preparing for its Broadway run since June. Last month, however, the entire cast was replaced and the show went through extensive retooling. Yet somehow, the show and its plot (which centered on the adventures of a group of Clay Aiken fans in Steubenville, Ohio) proved strangely uncompelling for discerning theatregoers. Producer Todd Ellis pithily ascribed the show’s problems to “a lack of advance ticket sales,” not to mention “a lack of positive feedback from audience members and critics and a lack of sustainable financial resources.”

Quite a comedown for a production that was touted back in June as “proof of how unfathomably big American Idol is in our culture today.” Maybe this is an indication that Idol’s unfathomable bigness is beginning to shrink, and our long national nightmare is finally coming to an end.