Broadway Shockers 2025: The Fall of The Queen and Other Smash-ing Flops Amid a Changing Broadway

As 2025 draws to a close, TheaterMania looks back on some of the most surprising stories of the year.

Used to be that a show would close on opening night. That doesn’t happen anymore. Instead of being put out to pasture almost immediately, a poorly received show in 2025 usually has just enough money in the till to be condemned to an arguably crueler fate: a painfully slow march toward an inevitable closing. The velvet seats get emptier and emptier, the word-of-mouth gets worse and worse, and the actors and creatives take to social media to defend their labor against the relentless scorn.

The two most notable failures of 2025 bookended the year, headlined by Broadway royalty. We began with Idina Menzel swinging from the trees in Redwood, a tech-heavy musical about a mother who retreats to Northern California as a way of processing her son’s death. We ended with the Kristin Chenoweth vehicle The Queen of Versailles, a satire—in theory—of American excess, about myopic billionaires determined to build the largest house in the country.

Neither show landed the way their respective authors intended, and the vitriol that followed, from many critics and laypeople alike, was predictable. In an earlier era, when budgets were smaller and suburban audiences still went to the theater regularly, these two shows might have eked out eight months, maybe even a year, fueled by the celebrity factor and the cachet of a New York Times “Critic’s Pick” designation. Once a coveted marker used to signify the very best, it has lost much of its weight after being applied to these two productions of dubious merit, as well as several others, including Smash, a show with similarly scary word-of-mouth that was probably doomed from the moment its creators decided to turn this campy, two-season TV series, beloved for its hate-watch appeal, into an earnest three-hour musical.

Of course, Redwood, Versailles, and Smash weren’t the only casualties. Dead Outlaw, Real Women Have Curves, and Boop! were arguably much better shows and they closed quickly, too. We can Monday-morning-quarterback the reasons for days. Did Dead Outlaw wait too long after its ecstatically received off-Broadway run to transfer? Should Real Women Have Curves have changed its title to reflect what the show was actually about? Did Rob Lake’s magic show need more Muppets? Yes, to all. But when record-setting Tony winner Audra McDonald can’t even sell out greatest-of-all-time musical Gypsy, you know the math isn’t mathing.

The cause is less mysterious than we’d like to admit. Broadway’s economics are broken. Ticket prices rise not only because a show is hot or has Denzel in the lead, but merely to make recoupment imaginable amid rising costs across the board. And with regular audiences priced out of the market, quality alone is no longer enough to ensure survival. This year, it didn’t matter if a show was poorly received like The Queen of Versailles, a critical darling like Dead Outlaw, or an audience favorite like Real Women Have Curves. There simply weren’t enough people who wanted to pay to see any of these shows.

Creative producers have figured out how to weather storms like these over time, mostly through stunt casting the likes of Pamela Anderson in Chicago and Tom Felton in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. But time is a luxury that Broadway no longer has. In 2025, if the cream doesn’t rise to the top right away, you’re basically done.

One trend—bringing in national tours for short Broadway stints—has already received its proof of concept in the form of Mamma Mia! and Beetlejuice. The middling grosses of the latter prove that lighting doesn’t always strike thrice, but the former has reliably proved to be the balm (for both our spirit and the box office) that it always has been. Regardless, they’ll both be gone in the next few weeks, with Mamma Mia! heading back on the road, now bearing the crucial tagline “direct from Broadway.” We may even be getting a Legally Blonde pitstop in the very near future.

As for the first quarter of 2026, there’s only one new musical that is wearing its hope for a long run on its sleeve: The Lost Boys, a vampire musical that has great word of mouth from early workshops. It will be playing alongside several newly announced productions that are hedging their bets by billing themselves as limited engagements. Of course, if one of these theater-fillers proves to be the smash that Smash wasn’t, the “limited” moniker will almost certainly disappear.

In a sea of uncertainty, one thing is unmistakable. As producers and theater owners scramble to find any kind of formula that keeps the lights on and the rent paid, we all have to admit that the era of the 35-year run ended the day the Phantom took off his mask.