A Perversion of Nostalgia on Broadway and London’s West End
By: Mirko Novak
It is November 2026, and two Palace Theatres tell the story of this post. In New York, the Palace has gone from a flop, Tammy Faye, which closed in 2024 after 29 performances, to The Lost Boys, which opened this spring and won 4 Tonys. In London, the Palace Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue has just retired the two-part Harry Potter and the Cursed Child after 10 years and replaced it with a single evening.
Here is my argument. Broadway, the theatre district of New York, runs on names you already know. The West End, London’s theatre district, at its best runs on shows you didn’t know you wanted. Under that divide I think there is another, which is that British writers understand the British palate and keep misjudging the American one. I love the theatres of both cities, and I am part of the problem on one side of the Atlantic.
A note on terms, because the argument depends on it. The West End is the cluster of commercial theatres around Shaftesbury Avenue, the Haymarket and Covent Garden, and when I say West End I mean those houses. Many of the London theatres I write about sit outside it, including the Almeida in Islington, the Old Vic and the National Theatre on the South Bank, the Bridge Theatre by Tower Bridge, Southwark Playhouse Elephant and The Other Palace near Victoria. Some are subsidised and some are not, but they share a smaller scale, and much of the work I admire starts there and only later moves into the West End. When I say London, I mean all of it.
I first noticed the pattern in March 2024. I was at The Other Palace in London, sitting in the dark waiting for Cruel Intentions The Musical to begin. A famous voice told the room to take out its phones and silence them. It belonged to Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played the original Kathryn Merteuil in the 1999 film and records the announcement before the show, as she did for its off Broadway run. Then she warned anyone hoping for green witches, boy wizards or flying cars that they had “come to the wrong effing palace theatre.”
It was funny, and it was also the first confession of the evening. A nostalgia musical, introduced by a nostalgia star, was mocking the nostalgia machine around it. The joke only works if you know how many Palaces there are. London has the Palace Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, where Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has played since 2016, and that is the boy wizard Gellar means. It also has The Other Palace, one of those smaller theatres outside the West End, a short walk from Victoria station, where I was sitting. Nearby, at the Apollo Victoria, lives the green witch of Wicked.
New York has its own Palace Theatre too, on 47th Street, which matters more to this post than any of them. After a renovation that lifted the building, it now holds 1,648 seats.
Start with the New York Palace, which opened in 1913 and was the pinnacle of success for generations of performers. It closed in 2018 to be lifted and refurbished, and Tammy Faye, Elton John’s musical about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, was the first full musical production announced for it afterwards. The show failed within weeks. A play, Glengarry Glen Ross, took over the theatre after it closed, and this spring the Palace opened The Lost Boys, a musical based on the 1987 vampire film. Previews began on March 27 ahead of an opening on April 26, 2026, with Michael Arden directing.
By most measures it is doing well. It tied for the most Tony nominations of the season, with 12, and won four Tonys on June 7, though Best Musical went to Schmigadoon!, itself a pastiche of Golden Age musicals adapted from a television series, which rather proves my point about the season. The Lost Boys has put tickets on sale through March 2027 and has announced a North American tour for 2028. It has taken $32.7 million in its first 28 weeks, with a best week of about $1.5 million. I can’t tell you whether it has recouped its costs, and in July Playbill noted that none of the season’s surviving new musicals, this show included, had yet emerged as a major box office hit. But it is among the season’s strongest new musicals, and I don’t resent it. It is a well built show on a famous stage, and it is also a clear example of Broadway’s formula. Take a title the audience already loves, add a rock score and sell them the feeling of 1987.
What surprised me is how well the show knows it. The musical begins with a group of teenage vampires watching an old video that mocks Ronald Reagan, the Republican president of the 1980s, and the nuclear family, so the 1980s are being laughed at before the first song ends. Their leader is Max, the owner of a video store, and the awkward dichotomy is that he is a conservative leading a gang of rebels. He calls Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate and a hero to American conservatives, a national treasure. Although he has created a gang of rebellious teenage vampires, he believes Lucy, the mother of the two brothers who have just arrived in town, will give the family the structure it needs. Unlike in the film, he suggests her boys work in his video store to provide them structure.
The Frog Brothers, Edgar and Alan, the teenage vampire hunters of the original film, immediately assume Reagan is the head vampire. Sam, Lucy’s younger son, talks them out of it by explaining that Reagan is in the light all the time, which a vampire could never be. Then Max jokes that making a musical out of a film reeks of desperation.
That line made me laugh, and it also stopped me, because it is the formula confessing. A conservative supervising a gang of rebels is a fair picture of Broadway itself, a business that loves the rebellious 1980s and wants them safely managed. London did the same thing with Cruel Intentions, so the confession is not an American habit. What the two shows share is that both can afford the joke because the audience already loves the thing being joked about.
The Palace has a history with this kind of bet. Elton John’s Lestat, a vampire musical based on Anne Rice’s novels, failed on the same stage in 2006. Whether or not Broadway has a vampire curse, The Lost Boys appears to have escaped it.
That is the perversion I mean. Nostalgia as a feeling is harmless. Nostalgia as a business model only ever asks what the audience already knows and never asks what they haven’t seen. Broadway’s recent seasons are full of titles the audience already knows, including Back to the Future, Moulin Rouge!, Death Becomes Her, Sunset Boulevard and Chicago. Even the great reinventions, Wicked and Hamilton, began with a familiar figure, whether the Wicked Witch of the West or the face on the $10 bill, and gave that figure a new angle.
Nowhere is the formula clearer than in my favourite Broadway ritual, the Harry Potter pilgrimage. I should say plainly that I went to see Tom Felton, who played the schoolboy villain Draco Malfoy in the films. He plays the adult Draco in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play that continues the story, at the Lyric Theatre in his Broadway debut, and his run has been extended many times and now ends on January 3, 2027. The AP reported that box office receipts jumped after he joined. When he leaves, the casting will carry on, because Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley in the films, will play Ron for 17 weeks starting February 2, 2027. The two of them will not share a stage. Nothing about the play has changed. The draw is the name. I don’t blame anyone for it, since I bought the ticket myself, but a theatre that fills seats with a childhood and a face from the films is not offering variety. It is offering a reunion.
The London Palace I mentioned at the start has been home to Cursed Child since 2016, the very theatre Gellar teases. This September, after 10 years, its two part version gave its final performance on September 20, and a one part version running 2 hours and 55 minutes replaced it in October. Broadway premiered the one part version in 2021, so it got there first. The two part show asked a visitor for about 5 hours and 15 minutes across two sittings, and the producers put about 425,000 tickets on sale for the new version at once. They describe the change as a way to bring London in line with the productions around the world, and the old version sold out its final performance, so I can’t claim it was failing. But I suspect a single evening is an easier sell to a visitor, and Broadway understood that first. Because Felton was the first member of the film cast to join the stage production anywhere, none of the film actors had played the London version in its decade.
My own habits show the pattern. In March 2024, while in New York, I saw Merrily We Roll Along, a Stephen Sondheim revival starring Daniel Radcliffe, the original Harry himself, and Jonathan Groff. At the end of the night Groff urged the audience to donate to Broadway Cares, which supports out of work performers. It was not his plea that made me give. It was Jon Steiger, an usher at the theatre who had originated Scorpius Malfoy, Draco’s son, in the San Francisco production of Cursed Child. He had started in New York as an usher at the Lyric Theatre, worked his way up to a lead and was back in the aisles with a torch. That is what moved me to donate.
Later that same month, back in London, I found Dominic Short working as an usher at Cruel Intentions at The Other Palace. He had played Albus Potter, Harry’s son, in the West End, and seeing him there added to the respect I already felt for struggling actors. That made two ushers on two continents in a single month, both from the same franchise. Even the announcement before the show made the point, because a famous face and voice were the draw before the first song had begun.
London has nostalgia too. Cruel Intentions proves it, and so do Back to the Future, Beetlejuice and Sunset Boulevard, which have all played the West End. The difference is one of degree.
London also has room for something like The Standard of Living, a new play by James Graham, the playwright behind Ink, a play about Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, and Dear England, and the writer of the book for Tammy Faye. It is a strictly limited 12 week season at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, about the economist John Maynard Keynes. Rory Kinnear plays him, and Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova makes her West End debut as his wife, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, under Nicholas Hytner’s direction. Tickets start from £30. A play about an economist with a ballet star in a leading role is an ambitious thing to stage commercially, and I wonder whether a Broadway producer would take that risk.
Which brings me to Rupert Goold, who I think of as the king of the British zeitgeist. He is a director who ran the Almeida, a small London theatre of 325 seats, and under him it launched numerous West End transfers. A Goold production there was an event whatever was on the stage, and I am among the fans who would have gone to almost anything, politics aside.
What he does better than anyone is take the British mood and put it in a room. With the playwright Mike Bartlett he made King Charles III, a play imagining the future reign of Prince Charles, which premiered at the Almeida before West End and Broadway transfers. With Graham he made Ink, at the Almeida in 2017 with a West End transfer to the Duke of York’s Theatre, and it later went to Broadway, where it earned the actor Bertie Carvel a Tony. Bartlett’s Albion, which Goold directed, is a state of the nation play about a woman restoring a garden, and I read it as a Brexit allegory that never needed the word. Its 2020 revival had Daisy Edgar-Jones, of Normal People fame, in the cast. Graham’s Dear England, which Goold directed at the National Theatre, followed Gareth Southgate, the former England football manager, and the national team, and I think it worked partly because football is a pillar of British culture, which is a safe bet for a British audience.
Look at what travelled, though. Monarchy and the press are subjects that carry anywhere, and in each case the writers were handling something close to home. The pattern changes when they turn to America. Graham, Bartlett and Goold are masters of the British mood, and they are far enough removed from American arguments to find them funny. They also live in a country where those arguments carry a different weight. In Pew’s 2023 survey of wealthy nations, 41% of Americans said religion was very important in their lives, against 21% of Britons.
Researchers who compared partisan hostility across nine OECD democracies over four decades found that it rose most in the United States, while in Britain it fell. (The published version of that study widened the sample to 12 countries.) The picture is not tidy, since after 2000 it rose in most countries, Britain included, and Brexit proved Britain has its own divide. But British writers have tended to handle theirs from the side. When they turn to America they tend to name the sides.
The 47th shows the temptation. In 2022 Bartlett staged an imagined 2024 American election at the Old Vic, in deliberately Bard like blank verse, with Carvel as a Trump who is at times like King Lear, deciding which of his children should succeed him, and at others like Richard III, scheming to seize the crown. Lydia Wilson played Ivanka as her father’s favoured child, right hand woman and potential rival. Carvel himself said the play was not a hatchet job and gave Trump a serious emotional hinterland, so I won’t call it a simple morality play. But it is a good example of what the British palate does with American politics, which is to turn it into Shakespeare. It was a fantasia about a faraway country for a London audience, and I suspect it would have landed differently in New York, where the story is the news. As far as I can tell, there were never plans for it to cross the Atlantic.
This is where my other weakness comes in. I saw Tammy Faye six times at the Almeida when it opened there in October 2022, in a theatre where a ticket cost £65, roughly what I’d expect to pay for a cheap seat on Broadway. I missed the Broadway run entirely, but I was lucky enough to watch a recording of it on YouTube. That means I can speak for the Almeida from my seat and for the Palace only from a screen, and I’ll try to be honest about the difference.
Elton John wrote the music, Jake Shears the lyrics, Graham the book and Goold directed. I first met Tammy Faye Bakker through reruns of The Golden Girls in the 1990s, where, as I remember it, Sophia Petrillo made a cutting remark about applying makeup with a butter knife that made Tammy Faye a joke before I knew she was a person. I stayed for something deeper. Here was a woman who believed Christian inclusion mattered more than the Old Testament’s divisions, and who fell, as I do, to excess.
I loved it, and I still think it shows exactly where a British writer’s palate runs out. The creative team was largely British, except for Shears, and said they were careful about coming to America to tell the story of an American icon. Katie Brayben, the lead, said she had never heard of the Bakkers before the show and doubted many British people knew who they were. That is the gap in a sentence, because a British audience was watching a story from outside, and an American audience was watching its own.
In Tammy Faye, Graham’s instinct for a moral binary, to my eye, took over, with gay characters as martyrs and saints and opponents such as Jerry Falwell, the Baptist preacher who founded the Moral Majority, as villains. Falwell tells California Governor Ronald Reagan in one scene that together they can return the country to a time of greatness, and that looks invented to me, since Falwell did not found the Moral Majority until 1979, four years after Reagan left the governor’s office. The show also stages a moving encounter between Tammy Faye and Pastor Steve Pieters, a gay pastor living with HIV, though in reality the 1985 interview was held by satellite and Tammy did not hug him. Zubin Varla won the Olivier for best supporting actor in a musical for playing Falwell, and I thought he found more humanity than the script gave him.
When the show moved to the Palace in the autumn of 2024, it did not lack names. Katie Brayben led the Broadway cast alongside two time Tony winners Christian Borle, as Jim Bakker, Tammy Faye’s husband, and Michael Cerveris, as Falwell. It opened on November 14 and closed on December 8, after 24 previews and 29 performances. I wasn’t in the room, so I rely on the recording and the record.
Elton John’s explanation was that the show was too political for America, and that Americans “don’t really get irony.” He first hinted at it in Time in December 2024, calling the show a political piece of work that pressed the wrong buttons in the days after the election, and then said it outright to the Sunday Times in April 2025, tying it to the fact that it came out during the US election. I used to disagree with him. I now think he was half right, because an American audience did meet the show as an argument and not as a joke. But I don’t think the calendar was the cause, and the next section is my case. Graham himself later said it was the wrong story, the wrong time and the wrong place, and that it opened days after Trump had won, telling with humour and a light touch the story of how the Christian right absorbed itself into the Reagan administration. The dates are not in dispute. Previews began on October 19, the election was on November 5 and the show opened nine days after the vote.
The numbers show how badly it went. It never filled more than two thirds of the house in November. It was capitalised for up to $25 million, yet in the week ending November 17, which included its comped opening night, it took $374,371 at 63% capacity, and the closing notice came five days after opening. People who were fooled by the Bakkers don’t want to revisit that era, and I suspect New Yorkers with religious upbringings often come to Broadway to escape it.
Sir Elton’s explanation depends on a counterfactual, so it is worth testing. Suppose Tammy Faye had opened this week instead. On November 3, CBS News projected that Democrats had won control of both the House and the Senate in the midterms. I take no view here on what that result means, and I only need it as a mood. Imagine the same show arriving in a room that feels vindicated rather than bruised, with a story about the Christian right’s alliance with Reagan landing on an audience in the mood to hear it. Would it have survived? I don’t think so, and I have four reasons.
The first is that the week itself did not suppress ticket buying. Maybe Happy Ending, a small science fiction love story about two robots, opened at the Belasco on November 12, 2024, two days before Tammy Faye, and went on to win six Tonys including Best Musical. It is still running. In the same week Sunset Boulevard posted its highest grossing week yet, at 95% capacity. Neither was a show about politics, which is exactly my point. The post election audience was available. It just wasn’t buying Tammy Faye. (There is a thread worth noticing here. Michael Arden directed both Maybe Happy Ending and The Lost Boys, and Andrew Barth Feldman, whose Nero I come to below, later played the lead of Maybe Happy Ending for nine weeks.)
The second is that Reagan satire is not poison on that stage. The Lost Boys opened at the same Palace 17 months later and laughs at Reagan and the nuclear family before its first song ends, and an audience that came to be entertained was glad to laugh. What Tammy Faye did differently was deliver a verdict. A joke about Reagan is a pleasure, and an indictment of a religious movement, in a house that may be full of people who grew up inside it, is homework.
The third is that the critics were not reviewing the election. The notices in New York were largely unfavourable, and a show with a loving London pedigree and bad American reviews has a quality problem with that room. No election result rewrites a review.
The fourth is that the 1,000 seat arithmetic doesn’t move. A better mood does not give a visitor from out of town a reason to know who Tammy Faye Bakker is, and it does not turn a cast of theatre names into the kind of star that fills 1,648 seats. The show had thin reach and a draw that only theatre people recognised, and it asked for an argument before it offered a pleasure. A friendlier week lifts every show a little. It does not lift a $25 million musical from 63% to the capacity it needs.
In fairness to Sir Elton, I can’t prove a counterfactual, and timing may have cost the show some goodwill at the margin. Graham thought as much. But marginal goodwill is not what separates 29 performances from a run. His two explanations also sit badly together. If the problem was the week, a better week fixes it. If the problem is that Americans don’t get irony, no election result translates the joke. I think the truth is neither. Who wins an election changes the mood in the room. It does not change the stakes, and the stakes are what turn a British comedy into an American argument. Elton and I are describing the same failure from opposite ends, but I put the cause in the show’s shape and not in the calendar.
It was also not Goold’s first Broadway disappointment. American Psycho, a musical of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel about a banker in the 1980s with a secret life as a killer, with a score by Duncan Sheik, was a sold out smash in London in 2013, in Goold’s first season as the Almeida’s artistic director. Then it crossed the Atlantic to the 1,079 seat Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, opened on April 21, 2016 and closed on June 5 after 27 previews and 54 regular performances. Both were stories of American excess, both began in a room of about 300 seats and both were directed by Goold. Tammy Faye managed about 54% as many regular performances, 29 against 54, on a bigger stage, 1,648 seats against 1,079. Goold brought American Psycho back to the Almeida in January 2026, in his final season there.
What interests me is what Broadway does with the 1980s the rest of the time. It will pay for the decade as a party, and it will even pay for jokes about it. The Lost Boys pokes fun at Reagan and the nuclear family and at its own desperation, and the joke is gentle and the audience is in on it. American Psycho and Tammy Faye used their humour as an indictment, of a banker who kills for sport and of a religious empire built on greed. Broadway wanted the costume of the 1980s more than the verdict.
That leaves the question that has nagged me most. If London’s variety is real, why has The Line of Beauty stayed where it began? It was a new adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel about gay life in Thatcher’s Britain and the AIDS crisis, directed by Michael Grandage, and it ran at the Almeida from October 21 to November 29, 2025, in Goold’s final season there, with a cast of 12. Many of its performances were sold out or close to it before it opened. As of this autumn I can find no announcement of a transfer, which would be unusual for a Grandage production, and Time Out noted at the time that a failure to transfer would be his first in well over a decade. I used to think that broke my argument. Now I think it completes it.
The Almeida is a test bed. It is a small subsidised theatre, so it can say yes to a play that a commercial producer could not afford to gamble on, and its audience is loyal, which means a sell out there is real but proves less than it seems. A six week sell out at about 325 seats puts roughly 15,000 people in the room. A house of 1,000 sells that many in under two weeks, and the New York Palace sells it in a little over one week. The question the Almeida cannot answer is whether a story can do that eight times a week for months.
So here is the formula as best I can find it, and I will call it the 1,000 seat test. It is a rule of thumb and not a law. A story needs three things to fill a big house consistently.
The first is reach, meaning a title that means something to people who don’t go to the theatre. The second is draw, meaning a face or a score that sells tickets by itself. The third is pleasure, meaning an evening that gives a stranger a good night out before it gives them an argument. At 325 seats one of these is usually enough, and for the Almeida it is a director’s name, a loyal membership and a title that readers know. At 1,000 seats you tend to need two. At the Palace’s 1,648 you need all three.
The draw is the part London underrates. Felton’s effect on the Lyric’s box office is the plainest example I know. Tammy Faye had a Broadway cast of Tony winners and Elton John’s name, but a cast of theatre names is the Almeida kind of star and not the kind that fills the Palace.
Now apply the test. The Lost Boys has reach in the 1987 film, draw in its rock score and pleasure in its jokes, and it fits a 1,648 seat house. Cursed Child, with Felton now and Grint to follow, has all three. The 47th filled the Old Vic, I understand, because everyone knows Trump, Carvel is a Tony winner and it was written in verse and often funny.
Tammy Faye has thin reach for a tourist, since Tammy Faye Bakker means more to me through The Golden Girls than to most visitors, and it offered an argument before pleasure. American Psycho has the reach of a famous novel and film, a modest draw and almost no comfort. The Line of Beauty has reach among readers of the novel, a strong cast built around no single headline star and an ambitious evening about class, desire and the AIDS crisis. It passes the Almeida’s test on one factor and fails the 1,000 seat test on the others.
The proof from the other side is 1536, a new play about three women in Anne Boleyn’s last year, which moved from the Almeida to the Ambassadors Theatre for a limited season from May to August 2026 and was nominated for the Olivier for best new play. The transfer was presented with Sonia Friedman Productions and LuckyChap, Margot Robbie’s company, and the Ambassadors is a much smaller house, so it was sized to the demand the play had proved.
This autumn offers another test case in Pride, a new musical based on the 2014 film about gay activists supporting striking miners in the 1980s. It is moving from the National’s Dorfman Theatre to the Bridge Theatre after a sold out run, and it is another 1980s story, but it comes with a famous film behind it and songs to carry the pleasure.
At the first preview of Nero on November 2, at the Southwark Playhouse, I met the newest test of everything above. It has book and lyrics by Steven Sater, music by Duncan Sheik, direction by Lindsay Posner and choreography by James Cousins, and it is billed as a story of ambition, the theatre of politics and the cost of absolute power. Sheik, who also scored American Psycho, died on September 17 at 56, so this is a premiere with a shadow over it, and it had been through workshops for roughly two decades. Andrew Barth Feldman, best known for Dear Evan Hansen, the film No Hard Feelings and Maybe Happy Ending, leads in his London debut, alongside Rhianne-Louise McCaulsky, whom I last saw in Cruel Intentions, as well as Nabi Brown, Waylon Jacobs, Steven Carlile and Sally Dexter. Press night follows on November 6, and it runs to December 5.
I expected a show about Nero. What I got felt closer to Game of Thrones, and to the many tellings of Caligula over the years. The 1st sign was the Oedipal focus, which was all over the evening, with incest claimed at almost every turn. There is ancient support for the instinct, since the Roman historians repeat rumours about Nero and his mother, Agrippina. But on stage it read to me as the Caligula tradition, the one that runs through Gore Vidal’s Caligula and, for me, most closely through Alexis Arquette’s Caligula in the season 6 Xena Warrior Princess episode The God You Know, right down to the death scene. When a story about Rome needs a family to be rotten, incest is the shortcut writers keep taking. It makes a court feel like a house of horrors, and a house of horrors is easy to sell.
Feldman was exceptional. He has a range I closely associate with Mason Alexander Park, whom I saw in the opening of Jamie Lloyd’s Much Ado About Nothing with Tom Hiddleston, which is crossing the Atlantic to Broadway as I write, in previews now and opening at the Winter Garden on November 19. He is also a draw in the sense of the 1,000 seat test, because Dear Evan Hansen and Maybe Happy Ending have given him a following that will cross an ocean.
Apply the test. Nero has reach, since everyone knows the emperor who fiddled while Rome burned, and it has draw in Feldman and in the Spring Awakening name. Pleasure is the open question after one preview, and I would rather wait for the reviews than guess. What I can say is that it carries the risk I have been describing, a story of excess that wants to indict its subject, in the lineage of American Psycho, which Sheik also scored, and Tammy Faye. If Nero ever moves to a bigger house, the question will be the one this post keeps asking, whether a story about a monstrous ruler can give a stranger a good night out before it argues with them. For now it sits in a small off West End room, where that question doesn’t yet need an answer.
The 1,000 seat test is about money, but I want to be honest that part of my argument is not about money at all. There is a dignity to theatre in London that I find hard to describe and easy to miss when it is gone. In the West End you are expected to be considerate of the people around you. Latecomers may have to wait until the interval, so the first scene belongs to the people who arrived on time, and it is rare to see anyone climbing across a row in the middle of a song. Part of that is house rules, and part of it is a shared understanding that the audience is part of the performance.
Broadway is still a relaxed environment, where people drift in after the second act has begun and a night at the theatre can feel like just another outing. It is not simply that London has fewer tourists, because roughly one in four international visitors to London attends a West End performance. The difference is in the habits the building insists on.
Pricing is not comparable either, and the gap shapes everything above. Broadway’s average ticket in the 2025 to 2026 season was about $131. In the West End, the median ticket in 2025 was £56, and 17.64 million people attended, nearly three million more than Broadway. (That sets an average against a median, so the gap is rougher than it looks.) London sells more seats at lower prices, and Broadway sells fewer seats at higher ones.
\The reason is cost. The average Broadway musical can cost more than $20 million to mount, with weekly operating expenses approaching $1 million. An analysis by Gordon Cox of Variety found that producing a musical on Broadway can cost three to five times as much as in the West End. The Economist reported that Sunset Boulevard cost $13.5 million to capitalise on Broadway against £2.5 million in the West End. The labour landscape is part of the reason, since the Society of London Theatre negotiates with 3 unions while the Broadway League negotiates with 13.
London is not cheap, and its production costs have doubled in a decade, but it spreads its risk. As an NPR reporter put it years ago, a West End show does not need to be as much of a hit to break even. That is the real reason for nostalgia. On Broadway, a title everyone knows is not a taste. It is insurance. If Broadway wants the next cult hit, it needs seats a younger audience can afford, but its cost structure makes that very hard.
It also explains why shows close. On Broadway the endings come fast. Tammy Faye lasted under a month and American Psycho 54 performances. This season Beaches, The Queen of Versailles and Chess have already closed after struggling at the box office, and this summer the Jellicle Ball revival of Cats closed on August 8, four months after opening on April 7, despite winning three Tonys, because its weekly sales could not carry a large cast. Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer of Cats, wrote that bringing almost any new show to Broadway makes little financial sense.
London rarely ends a show early, though it does happen. The clearest recent case is Opening Night, a musical at the Gielgud Theatre starring Sheridan Smith, with a book by Ivo van Hove and songs by Rufus Wainwright, based on John Cassavetes’s 1977 film. It began previews on March 6, 2024 and was scheduled to run until July 27, but on April 11 the producers announced, citing a challenging financial landscape, that it would close on May 18, more than two months early.
Trainspotting the Musical is a more complicated case, and it is worth being precise. It is based on Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel about heroin addicts in Edinburgh, which became a cult film in 1996, and Welsh wrote the stage version himself, with songs by him and Stephen McGuinness. It began previews at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on July 15 and had its press night on July 22, as a limited season to September 5, to poor reviews, and a five month UK tour of about 30 cast members was planned to follow. On August 3 the tour was cancelled over poor ticket sales.
So the London season ran to its booked end, and what disappeared was everything planned after it. I would not call that closing early, but it is the same story. It was a nostalgia project with among the most famous titles in 1990s British culture, and its reviews and its sales could not carry it beyond the capital. A famous title was not enough, and London’s insurance can fail too.
Clueless the Musical is the cleaner case, because it did what Trainspotting could not and still ended early. It was the stage version of Amy Heckerling’s 1995 film, a loose update of Jane Austen’s Emma set in Beverly Hills, with Heckerling writing the book herself, a new score by KT Tunstall and lyrics by Glenn Slater. An earlier jukebox version had played Off Broadway in 2018 to mixed reviews, and this one was a completely new take, tried out for two weeks at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley in February 2024 before it moved to the Trafalgar Theatre, where it began performances on February 15, 2025. London’s critics were largely kind, and in April the producers extended the booking into March 2026.
Then in July the closing notice went up. The final performance was Saturday August 23, 2025, about seven months before the booked end, and the announcement presented it as a pause ahead of a UK tour, due to begin at Bromley in September 2026, with plans for Mexico City, Australia, Japan and Europe. I can find no reason given for the early closure, and West End shows rarely publish their weekly grosses, so I can’t tell you what the sales looked like. What I can say is that the reviews do not look like the problem, which is what makes it a harder case for London than Trainspotting. A famous title, the film’s own writer and decent notices were not enough to hold a West End house for the full run it had booked.
Its lead has had a better year than its production. Emma Flynn played Cher from the Bromley try-out to the last night at the Trafalgar, and in January she was announced as the new Glinda in Wicked on Broadway. She joined the Gershwin Theatre company on March 3, 2026, in her Broadway debut, opposite Keri René Fuller’s Elphaba, replacing Allie Trimm in a show then in its 23rd year and the fourth longest running in Broadway history. It is a neat move, from the most popular girl at Beverly Hills High to the most popular girl in Oz, and it sends the Atlantic traffic of this post in an unusual direction, because a performer from a closed London nostalgia show was cast as the lead in one of the best known titles on Broadway. And since Wicked is the green witch of Gellar’s joke, it brings me back to where I started.
I can’t prove what lay behind the closure, and I haven’t seen the books. But set Clueless beside Cursed Child and the pattern is hard to miss. Felton’s name lifted the box office for a play whose script had not changed, while Clueless had good notices, a famous title and no household name on stage, and on the 1,000 seat test the empty box is draw. If that is right, London’s insurance failed Trainspotting through its reviews and failed Clueless through its casting, and the one asset that travelled was the actor.
Pandemic aside, I can’t recall a production at the National Theatre, Britain’s flagship subsidised theatre, ending early for lack of an audience. A subsidised theatre does not have to close a show because of a single weak week at the box office, and a commercial producer can book a limited season so that a modest result is not a failure.
That is also why Goold’s new job matters. He left the Almeida, where Dominic Cooke succeeds him, and became the artistic director of the Old Vic in spring 2026, though his predecessor Matthew Warchus is programming through the end of the year. The Old Vic has more than 1,000 seats to fill, against the Almeida’s 325, and receives no public subsidy. At the Almeida he could programme a serious, uncomfortable play and rely on a loyal audience to fill the room. At the Old Vic he needs about 1,000 people a night, and loyalty alone will not supply them.
That puts him in a bind that every programmer of a big theatre faces. If he chooses only the hard, challenging work he is best known for, plays that accuse their audience as American Psycho and Tammy Faye did, he will struggle to fill the seats, because a general audience will not pay to be lectured for an evening. If he chooses only safe, crowd pleasing entertainment, he will fill the seats but lose the daring that made his name. The skill is in combining the two, offering an evening that is enjoyable on the surface and serious underneath.
I would argue King Charles III and Ink did that, and The 47th got close. In my 1,000 seat test, every show he chooses at the Old Vic needs reach, draw and pleasure, and then has to earn its argument on top. I will be watching his first season, due next year, to see whether the Old Vic becomes a theatre of famous names or of new ideas.
So the contrast I started with was too crude. Broadway is not simply nostalgic and London simply varied. There are two divides at work, one of scale and cost and one of palate. A small room can afford to ask whether a story is good, and a big room has to ask whether it will sell eight times a week. Broadway has more big rooms and higher bills, so it asks the second question more often, and nostalgia is the cheapest insurance against the answer.
London has lower bills, a subsidised pipeline and a public that is expected to behave, so it asks the first question more often. But its best writers read their own country’s mood so well that they forget America has a different one, and what a British audience enjoys as comedy, an American audience lives as an argument, whoever has just won an election.
Nostalgia starts as a feeling and ends as a policy, and the people who pay for the policy are the ones in the aisles. Look at who is standing in them. Steiger and Short had stood on the biggest stages in the world, and now they were showing strangers to their seats. In the dark at The Other Palace, Gellar poked fun at those craving homely nostalgia of Wicked and Harry Potter, and signalled that Cruel Intentions was the edgier show. But we go to these shows because they are familiar, and we stay because we engage with them. Earlier eras digested a story properly before the next one arrived. Now most new material is made to be half watched with a phone in your hand.
Theatre is one of the few places left that can make you engage with something you would never choose on your own. Nostalgia sells, and I am encouraged about the future, because the famous name gets you in the room and the room does the rest. Let it sell the ticket. I want the reunion.
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