Why West End Hits Get Panned in New York

"Praise the lord for Tammy Faye," American filmmaker Matt Wolf cheered in The New York Times when the Elton John musical opened in London in 2022.

- Jesse Green

The show, Wolf added, "has a heart as big as the title character's bouffant hairdo."

Two years later, reviewing the Broadway transfer, journalist Elisabeth Vincentelli begged to differ. "Disjointed, strangely bland," she wrote, also in The Times. Trying to go "behind the mask of this complicated, outsize woman," she argued, had made her "smaller than life."

Critics, even those who are colleagues, disagree, sometimes diametrically. That is part of the pleasure of criticism — and of theatregoing.

But pans of English transfers have been too pervasive of late to be random. The new musicals Tammy Faye and Back to the Future, as well as recent revivals of Cabaret and Sunset Boulevard, are just a few of the shows warmly reviewed in London, only to be greeted on Broadway by a cold New York slap.

I am often one of the slappers.

Take Back to the Future for example. The Telegraph gave the London production five stars and called it "a feel-good triumph." I gave the Broadway version a hard time: "Less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir."

Or take, for instance, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cinderella. "It adds up to not so much a ball as a blast," stage editor Chris Wiegand wrote in The Guardian of the 2021 London premiere. My take when it crossed the Atlantic after changing its name, daringly, to Bad Cinderella? "Surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down."

Nor does a distaste for hand-me-downs explain the difference; the same pattern applies regardless of where a production begins.

In December 2024, The Guardian called The Lightning Thief, an American musical that transferred to London, "cute, boutique, original." When I saw it on Broadway in 2019, it had "all the charm of a tension headache."