American shows are taking over the West End: should we applaud or riot?
Soaring costs back home mean US producers are flocking to the West End, with London emerging as a new testing ground for tomorrow’s hit shows – but don’t British audiences deserve to see American work that’s already got the Broadway seal of approval, rather than flawed early drafts, asks Alice Saville
I’ve only been in London for three weeks,” says Mark Cortale. “But now that I’m here, I never want to leave.” He’s hardly the first visitor to fall in love with this city. However, unlike most Americans visiting London in July, Cortale isn’t here for free museums or sun-scorched parks. Instead, he’s a Provincetown theatre producer who’s finding that his famously stressful profession is a little easier this side of the pond.
“Quite frankly, the model for the development of new musicals is broken in the United States,” he says on a break from steering his latest show, Maiden Voyage, at Southwark Playhouse. “It’s impossibly expensive to launch something there. It’s less than a quarter of the price in London.”
So what makes working in London so appealing for a theatre producer? It’s not the Pret a Mangers or Lime bikes. It’s the freedom from terrifying financial stakes. American theatre production costs are soaring thanks to pricey Manhattan real estate, stricter union rules, higher labour costs, and audience numbers that have been slower to bounce back after the pandemic. At the same time, Donald Trump’s presidency has created anxiety around falling tourist numbers on Broadway.
Meanwhile, on the West End, things are booming: last year, theatre attendance in London reached 17.1 million, in an 11 per cent increase on pre-pandemic levels. Cortale jokes: “There was a part of me that was reluctant to do this interview because I don’t want everyone from the United States to read this and come over here!”
Still, he’s far from the only American theatre producer to have had this lightbulb moment post-pandemic. New US shows on the West End this year have ranged from schlocky musicals (Clueless; The Devil Wears Prada) to hyped star vehicles (Elektra with Brie Larson) and musical theatre oddities (Oscar at The Crown; Shucked). Should audiences be applauding this injection of new blood, or wondering what it says about the state of UK theatre?
Stages in the West End have long housed American shows, especially musicals, from the golden age classics of composers Rodgers and Hammerstein to newer, splashier hits like The Book of Mormon and Hamilton. What’s different about the current state of play is that, rather than rolling out Broadway blockbusters to grateful London audiences (like this year’s Stereophonic orNatasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812), many US producers are now treating this city as a place to develop the hits of the future. Which is why Cortale is venturing to Southwark Playhouse, a small theatre that nonetheless propelled the new British show Operation Mincemeat first into the West End, then on to Broadway success.
But how hard is it to make the leap from British soil to New York’s fabled Great White Way? When I call super-producer Michael Harrison, he’s still riding high after his latest show – director Jamie Lloyd’s big, splashy, fabulous take on classic musical Evita – landed five-star reviews on the West End. Lloyd’s previous big production, Sunset Boulevard, is currently one of the highest-grossing productions on Broadway after transferring from London last year. But that success hasn’t made him complacent.
“Broadway is just so expensive. You could do a musical here for two or three million pounds that would cost 14, 15 million dollars there,” Harrison says. And with that additional expense comes terrifying uncertainty: “If a show does get bad reviews here in London, it won’t close two weeks later, which you do still hear stories of in New York.”
Producer Eleanor Lloyd has made her career propelling exciting new voices to the West End, like the rabble-rousing feminist drama Emilia or the moving Black British love story Shifters. As she explains, “On Broadway, a show could lose you a million dollars a week if it doesn’t work, whereas here you might lose a five-figure sum at worst. That means the range of work that can succeed here is broader than on Broadway, because we can afford to gradually build word of mouth.”
If the financial landscape is easier to navigate, so is the cultural one. When Lloyd took Olivier Award-winning director Robert Icke’s play 1984 to Broadway, things turned a bit dystopian. “On the West End, we had a young audience at a relatively low ticket price, but on Broadway, that audience couldn’t afford to come, and that meant the numbers didn’t add up.” Differing tastes were an issue, too: “It was an Orwellian nightmare of a play. The British audience loved the intensity of it, but the last scene is a man’s face being eaten by a rat. Broadway was not into it.”
Lloyd is nibbling at the extremities of a key issue here. For commercial theatre producers, it’s all about the bottom line. But audiences don’t fit into black and white columns: taste is fickle, variable, and most of all local. And if Broadway audiences are less amenable to bracing new plays, they’re omnivorous in their appetite for innovative musicals, including introspective experiment A Strange Loop (which fared far better across the pond than over here). “Musical theatre is the backbone of American theatre: if we have Shakespeare, they have Rodgers and Hammerstein,” explains Harrison.
Musical theatre is the backbone of American theatre: if we have Shakespeare, they have Rodgers and Hammerstein
The YouTuber and critic Mickey-Jo Boucher reckons this aspect of US culture – its reverence for musicals – is why we get so many lazy-feeling American stage adaptations premiering in the UK. “Pretty Woman: The Musical ran for considerably longer in the UK than it did on Broadway, where they sniff out these very commercial adaptations and they don’t last very long,” he says. “If something’s more cynical, it does better over here in the UK.”
Perhaps that’s also because Broadway ticket prices are at least double the cost of those on the West End. London audiences can afford to treat a musical as a naff-but-fun night out, whereas New York audiences carefully scan reviews and award nominations to make sure they’re picking a quality show before they shell out.
Idealistic theatre critics like me might mourn a West End dominated by underwhelming-but-sellable riffs on existing IP. Still, even Lloyd pragmatically admits that commercial theatre is about shifting tickets. “And the public isn’t wrong, whatever it decides it wants to see,” she says. “I can feel frustrated sometimes, but people have to choose how to spend their hard-earned money.”
But what if the public don’t really know what they’re buying tickets to? Boucher has been watching a new trend unfold with interest: American producers using London as a testing ground. “Productions that are eyeing Broadway transfers come here first,” he reckons. Historically, new Broadway shows would have “try-outs” in other major American cities like Chicago and San Diego, developing away from the harsh gaze of New York’s scathing critics. However, lately, they’re venturing across the pond.
The Devil Wears Prada is a case in point. After a poor reception in Chicago, it came to London instead of making the expected transfer to New York – but its stateside ambitions are unlikely to be over (as American observer Howard Sherman noted in his 2022 article “Is the US out-of-town try-out dead?”, the show holds the copyright to Devil Wears Prada Broadway).
The middling TripAdvisor reviews for the musical – based on the Anne Hathaway fashion film of 2006 – suggest a faintly disappointed audience: “I think this put me off musicals for life,” writes user Zulekha A. Alison S wrote: “We both dozed off in the first half… Something is missing from this show but I’m not sure what.”
We stand to benefit in a lot of ways if the US mindset comes here, especially in the way that they uplift musical theatre and invest in it
London ticket prices may be lower than New York’s, but they’re still expensive. Surely West End audiences deserve to see American work that’s already got the Broadway seal of approval, rather than flawed early drafts?
And, just as importantly, there’s a risk that an influx of new American shows could mask a dearth of British talent; 2025 has seen almost no major premieres of new work by UK musical theatre writers. Perhaps, as well as welcoming American shows to our stages, we need to embrace their attitude, too. “I think we stand to benefit in a lot of ways if the US mindset comes here,” says Boucher, “especially in the way that they uplift musical theatre and invest in it.”
As a theatre director who’s passionate about platforming new British musical theatre writers, Adam Lenson agrees: “There are so many incredible new musicals by UK-based writers and we should be giving them similar resources, opportunities and care.”
Last year was a bright spot, with a Best New Musical Olivier win for homegrown hit Benjamin Button. But 2025 looks grimmer. Of the likely contenders so far for the same category in the next Olivier Awards, only the yet-to-debut Paddington the Musical is the product of a British lyricist/composer duo.
The picture for new plays looks rosier, with the UK’s subsidised theatres producing a healthy crop of productions each year. But things aren’t as healthy as they could be after more than a decade of Tory rule. According to the BBC, the 40 major subsidised theatres staged 229 original productions in 2024, compared with 332 in 2014. Keir Starmer’s election was greeted with excitement by the UK arts industry. Still, if improvement is on the way, Lloyd says, “it’s been slow to get going. It’s not the significant moment [we expected].”
The UK’s theatre culture is dominated by government-funded space. As Lloyd says, “The strength of our non-profit sector is massive.” But in the US, private investment in theatre is the norm, with deep-pocketed arts philanthropists drawn to the glamour of opening nights and award ceremonies. As Boucher explains: “Every time a Broadway musical wins a Tony award, you see about 70 people flood the stage, because it takes an army of investors to make a musical. So they’re attracted to being part of a smaller team in London, and that feeling is a little more special for them.”
Certainly, American interest in the West End is providing a welcome injection of opportunities, energy, and most of all cash. Cortale is already planning another London show next year. But does he worry that his new lease of producing life comes at a cost for the UK’s homegrown theatremakers? “Our director and our entire cast is British, so even though the writing team isn’t, we’re employing a great number of people from here,” he points out.
Harrison is still more positive, pointing to the growing culture of transatlantic co-productions that enable theatres to pool both resources and expertise: “It’s easy to look at the West End and Broadway as two separate entities, but in a lot of ways they’re incredibly joined up,” he says. Maybe, like Galinda and Elphaba in Wicked, we might look like rivals but there’s a deep friendship underneath. As Harrison puts it: “Everybody’s talking all the time, and I think that’s healthy.”
‘Maiden Voyage’ will open at Southwark Playhouse Elephant on 26 July
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