They were hits in London. Then they got smacked in New York

NEW YORK – “Praise the lord for Tammy Faye,” American film-maker Matt Wolf cheered in The New York Times when the Elton John musical opened in London in 2022. 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”.

So, what does explain the difference? Are American critics just grumpier than their English counterparts? Perhaps there is a little of that.

West End productions used to be the gold standard for high-class dramas and event musicals. In some cases, they still are.

The Lehman Trilogy, The Hills Of California, Six and & Juliet were greeted on Broadway with praise that seemed to justify their transfers.

But recalling decades in which London imports flooded the market – Broadway in the 1980s was said to be suffering a “British invasion” – critics no longer hesitate and, sometimes, even seem eager to refute the idea that whatever comes from the land of English playwright William Shakespeare must be worthy.

That is especially true when London shows tackle stateside subjects.

Back To The Future, though built by Americans and based on one of Hollywood’s most successful franchises, had a distinctly English accent on Broadway, as if put through multiple mistranslation bots. Tammy Faye, about heavily made-up Minnesota-born televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, missed the Midwestern boat entirely, with its cool, flat satire of an overheated personality.

Both shows had been revamped for New York, apparently not for the better – and without the benefit of intervening productions to stress-test the changes of content.

Changes of scale matter too. Moving Tammy Faye, which had played at the 325-seat Almeida Theatre in London, to the 1,650-seat Palace Theatre in New York, was “insanity”, Wolf told me. “Within the intimacy of the Almeida, it really landed, but I think everyone knew it was nonetheless a work in progress and needed nurturing. Why, then, catapult it to a huge Broadway house all guns blazing?”

Perhaps not all guns. American actor Andrew Rannells, who played Tammy Faye’s husband Jim Bakker in the London production, earning an Olivier award nomination, dropped out before Broadway, citing contract disputes. Bad Cinderella was completely recast, mostly unconvincingly.

Yet, importing the West End stars can also import problems. Back To The Future retained American actor Roger Bart as Doc Brown and British actor Hugh Coles as George McFly, both giving hugely overstated performances. The rest of the company, all new, played it better by playing it straighter.

Straighter for Broadway, anyway. American critics, if not always audiences, have generally preferred naturalistic interpretations. Whether in plays or musicals, we – okay, I – want to see how larger-than-life characters got that way, in response to particulars of circumstance and soul. I am interested in the drama of recognisably human behaviour, not in goofy, pratfalling ciphers or unmediated, born-that-way monsters.

London theatre, with its longer and quite different history, appears to have a greater tolerance for stylistic extremes. The West End Cinderella, Wolf said, was “clearly part of the thriving panto tradition here, and seen as a fun and frivolous addition to it”.

Expressionistic interpretations of naturalistically conceived characters are also highly praised in London.

As faded silent-movie star Norma Desmond in British director Jamie Lloyd’s filmic staging of Sunset Boulevard, American singer Nicole Scherzinger spent most of the time looking comatose in a slip. In British director Rebecca Frecknall’s environmental Cabaret, Irish actress Jessie Buckley did much the same.

Yet, both won Oliviers, and so did the deliberately alienating productions, designed in the Brechtian manner to keep viewers at an emotional distance. Goal achieved.

When Sunset Boulevard and Cabaret came to Broadway, with Scottish actress Gayle Rankin replacing Buckley, critics were highly divided. I was not. I spent less time at each show feeling relevant feelings than wondering which genius lingerie company had snagged the underwear concession.

Wolf, a New Yorker who has lived his entire professional life in London, liked both. Again, he sees the difference in critical reaction as an artefact of national character, expressed in preferred theatrical styles.

“Brechtian distance is certainly not an issue for British observers, who are more likely to chafe at overt emotionalism,” he said. In fact, he added: “I’ve heard many an American hit play derided in London for sentimentality and so-called special pleading.”

Point taken. The Times of New York may have given Slave Play raves, but The Times of London found it indulgent. Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning works by American playwrights Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Terrence McNally and Donald Margulies have all been dismissed abroad.

And yet, I have to ask myself how much of “national character” is really just personal taste. There are plenty of “sincere” English shows, and plenty of expressionistic American ones. For that matter, most critics are aesthetic chameleons. Their reactions to shows suggest no pattern at all, or a pattern too complicated to be discerned with the naked eye. Taste is a fingerprint.

It is also a scar. There is no truth to criticism beyond loving what we love and licking our wounds. That London shows are often panned in New York is, beyond that, inexplicable. Think of it as a supranational marital spat: Everyone is right and no one knows why. NYTIMES