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MickeyJoTheatre
the best shows Mickey-Jo saw in 2025 | reviews of plays and musicals from the last year
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Mickey Jo
So having spent 2025 traveling around the world seeing as many shows as possible in five different countries across two continents. From shipping containers at the Ed Festival Fringe to Broadway opening nights. Somewhere between 200 and 300 theatrical productions in total. No, I don't keep count. I now feel ready to tell you which were the very best shows of 2025. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to those of you listening to this roundup on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed. Needless to say with all things theatre if the introduction did not make that clear, I'm a professional theatre critic here on social media. I spend the majority of my days going to see theatre around the world, predominantly here in London's West End as well as on Broadway in New York, and I review almost all of the shows that I see here on social media. And today, as we prepare for a brand new year of exciting theatre going in 2026, I am glancing back over my shoulder just once more to let you know which were my absolute favourite productions in 2025. Needless to say, having seen an awful lot of great theatre this year, these were all five star reviews from me. Shows I absolutely loved. In fact, there were a bunch of shows with five star reviews that didn't make it onto this. There were just too many great things to choose from, but also in a couple instances because I had seen them before, particularly for Stereophonic and Shucked in London. They had already made this list in previous years when I saw them on Broadway. Same for Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York, Operation Mincemeat maybe. Happy ending musicals that I saw on Broadway this year that I had already seen previously. And my rule is if something makes the list one year, unless it's like a substantially reworked version or an entirely separate production of the show, then it can't make it again. That being said, those and many, many more are shows that I loved this year. If you haven't already, go and check out my reviews of all of those, especially if you are looking for great theater currently playing on Broadway or in the West End. What I'm going to be sharing with you today though are excerpts from the last 12 months of my reviews, the top 15 new shows which I fell in love with this year in reverse order, counting down to my favorite show of the year. For the past couple of years it's been a Broadway production. Who is going to win this year in the battle between Broadway and the West End? Or could it be a rogue third option? Stay tuned to find out and I would absolutely if you would share some of your top shows of the year in the comments section down below as well. We did this a few days ago with the worst shows of the year and even though I'm pretty sure that video is going to turn out to be more popular than this one, as far as the views go, this is actually what I like to do even more. Since the beginning of me sitting down here and talking to you tiny people in my camera, it's always been about passionately and excitedly talking about theater that I love. So let's do a little more of that right now. Here are what I consider to be the best shows from. From the last year. So in 15th place and there were so many shows that nearly got this spot that I was weighing up. I think for sheer delight alone, it has to go to this one. And one of my favourite theatrical experiences to have is when material I know very well is done brilliantly in a way that can still surprise me. On this particular evening, I went to Reading Rep Theatre in Berkshire to go and see a new co production of the last five years. Framing is everything in the last five years. And if we get where we start, then we know what's happening. If we know that she's in the end and she's going to go this way and he's at the start and he's going to go this way, then we already know what is to come and it's not like we're going to get dislodged from that understanding. And Hal Chambers and movement director Georgina Lamb, I think she probably deserves credit here as well, has staged the most brilliant first few, not even minutes moments. The first few moments of this production, I thought was so gorgeous and so clear and so strikingly fascinating to me. The two performers entering the space over these very haunting opening melodies and sort of mournfully and yet with a very empty, vacant quality as well, stepping up onto the little plinth and moving towards each other to embrace and dance, which will eventually happen in the show and almost always does, but then not. And passing each other, which is basically a metaphor for what the whole conceit of the thing is. Both reaching for what is in front of them, which is a written letter on top of a cardboard box. And then seamlessly, she grabs the letter, he grabs the box and the two of them pass and they pull them away in this beautiful little moment of staging that leads us directly into the beginning of Still Hurting and contextualizes what it is that we are about to see. She is reading a letter that has been left and he is taking a box of his things away. And this was a really interesting insight into the fact that you can play with it a little bit and you can bring them into contact with each other in this production. And that's sort of the ethos of this production, between the extent to which it actually involved partner work and, you know, the way that that was the framing device for the entire show. This moment at the beginning when they were almost embracing but then not, and the use of the band as well. This production, I think, was characterized by multiple different layers of reality and a lot of charmingly fundamental theatrical storytelling techniques. A lot of it reminded me of, you know, really going back to basics when we tell a musical story on stage and what we can do with that. Oh, also, and not for nothing, Martha Kirby is the first ever Kathy to convince me when you come home for me is actually a good audition song for her. Now, if you've already seen my worst of roundup, you will know that there's a little bit of symmetry here. Reading Rep featured on that list as well. But I loved this production and I enjoyed thoroughly more of their shows than I didn't this year. So great job to reading Rep. It's also not the only time that I saw the last five years this year. And the Broadway production was maybe my least favourite show of the entire year. So for me to then a couple months later get to see a great revival, you know, I needed this. Next up, do you want to know what I really loved in 2025? In at number 14, we have hole. Oh, how I enjoyed Hole. What I am talking about here is my favorite show from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Let's cut to my review on the street amidst that theatrical marathon. Honestly, they had me at Hole. Okay, so every year when I cover shows at the Fringe, people want to know what is the best new musical? What is the funniest show? What is the smartest, best written show? What is that hidden gem that's gonna take them by surprise? And this year, although I have plenty of shows left to see, I dare say all of those accolades could go to one single show, and that is a musical called Hole. This show is playing at Underbelly Cowgate. It is a two person performed original musical, utterly original, and it's an outrageous and slightly bizarre comedy about a small religious community in Utah who are convinced by their pastor who has a vision from God they must wear butt plugs at all times in order to plug up the sin inside of themselves. And so after he orders 8,000 wooden butt plugs from Amazon, they do just that. And it's at this point when I tell you that this is a structurally sound and brilliantly written, hilarious new musical that you are just going to have to trust me. It reminds me an awful lot of the musical Gutenberg. The lyrics are ingenious. Some of the best that I've heard all week. Several of these songs were absolute bops. I love the bizarre and quirky design. They were making foley sounds live on stage. As well as accompanying themselves against all odds, it metamorphosizes into a queer love story. There are several moments that speak profoundly about religious indoctrination and even more moments that offer you just so many butt jokes. And if you're looking for another show to compare it to, I would say Book of Mormon walked so that whole could uncomfortably shuffle Edinburgh fringe is always incredibly fatiguing. And I'm not sure within the confines of the time that I had, I was able to really explain to you how zany, hilarious and brilliant and ingenious this production was. I try and be pretty content with singular theatrical experiences and, you know, holding on to and cherishing the memory of seeing something once that was perfect. But that's not the case for Hull. I need Hole to come back. I am manifesting a big return for hole in 2026. More hole in the future, please. You all need whole. I'm not. I'm not going to stop talking about this, okay? In at number 13 is a play I have seen twice this year. It was actually the first show I saw in 2025. I saw it again on a different continent a few weeks ago. I am talking about Robert Icke's adaptation of Oedipus. Visionary creative, theatre maker that he is, he wrote and directed this production starring Mark Strong and Leslie Manville as Oedipus and Jocasta. An utterly thrilling piece of theatre which I never got around to fully reviewing here on social media because I never officially asked to, and I always had other things to get to that I had been invited to review. But I'm very, very glad that I had the chance to see it and to experience it, both with entirely fresh eyes and then subsequently knowing where everything was going, which there's always, if you're familiar with Oedipus, which I gather most people are something of a sense of, with that kind of a Greek tragedy and its trajectory anyway, which this production even nodded to, with an onstage clock counting down the minutes until the results of an election. Oedipus taking place in a contemporary political context. But it flooded the whole thing with not only this delicious sense of dramatic irony, but also a brilliant inherent tension, this sort of ticking time bomb of inevitability alongside the characters on stage, whose performances were exemplary, brilliant work from Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, particularly with each other, particularly the bond and the chemistry that they created in this sort of impossible science experiment. The final few moments of the play, as we arrive at its conclusion, are particularly agonizing to watch. But the whole thing is intense and captivating. And the really winning quality of it, I think, is that the two leading characters are afforded a really believable, plausible deniability. There comes a point in other adaptations of this story where it starts to feel baffling that they haven't put all the pieces together. But with these two, you can buy that they don't grasp the gravity of their utterly regretful circumstances until they do. Oedipus continues to run at Studio 54 on Broadway in New York. You can get tickets and go and check it out for yourselves right now. And you could also do the same with the next one. This is Liberation. Now, I'd heard great things about this play from its Off Broadway run, particularly the way it empowered a lot of my female friends to feel more closely connected to their mothers, their grandmothers, women of previous generations, because it's an intergenerational feminist dialogue. The only other thing I knew about it prior to seeing it at the James Earl Jones Theatre on Broadway was that it contained a scene of extended nudity. Here were my thoughts on that particular scene and the framing device of the entire play. The play's framing device is so, so brilliant because to my mind, while it's interesting enough to exhibit this as a period piece and re examine this decade, you know, more than 50 years ago, there's sort of little point in doing it if it isn't going to be brought powerfully into conversation with where we are today. She tells us. I am looking at it from this perspective, and so we all do inherently, by extension as well, we are seeing all this through the eyes of the playwright, which is something that I think in a lot of writing and a lot of theatre and direction, you hope to achieve by the end of the thing. Once you can, figuratively speaking, enter into conversation with the creators of the piece, the writers of the piece, and understand what it is that they are exploring or hoping to articulate, then I think it allows you to see it from the ideal perspective. This conversation, this beautiful conversation, while this company of women, women sit in a semicircle, nude on stage before a multi tier theatrical audience, gives way to these profoundly honest reflections on life. And it's a fascinating, beautiful scene that enduringly, afterwards, I just felt sort of grateful for. It felt like a real privilege as an audience member to have had the opportunity to bear witness to that level of emotional honesty within the writing, but also within the performances to play the scene as well. If you've listened to my review of Liberation, you know, I spoke extensively about that framing device. I went on to speak about other elements of the brilliant writing from Best Wall and the fantastic performances. It's a wonderful company, but my favorite thing about it, I think, is that it just really addressed so many of the thoughts I've been having about how we establish meaningful dialogue with an audience and ensure that everybody's on the same page. Sometimes a level of ambiguity and room for interpretation is helpful in theatre. Sometimes clarity is best. Sticking with the Broadway play, but taking a few steps across midtown Manhattan, we're traveling back earlier in the year to when Purpose was running at the Hayes Theatre. This is a demonstrably acclaimed play, award winning, brilliant new work from Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, commissioned by the acclaimed Steppenwolf Theatre Company and very much nodding to plays in their particular style as well as other American class. Here is what I had to say about Purpose. But it isn't just August Osage county that this play feels like it's speaking to. It also feels like it's in response to the classic American family drama, the likes of Cat and A Hot Tin Roof quite specifically. And the presence of a great and respected man as the figurehead of this family as pictured here on the show artwork also reminds me of those sort of great man plays like Death of a Salesman is the obvious one, but also all my sons. You know, Arthur Miller and his daddy issues. Also Long Day's Journey Into Night, just like their we have two different sons here, neither of whom have been able to satisfy their father's expectations, both reckoning with the same kind of ideas of like how dare you follow in my footsteps and how dare you not follow closely enough in my footsteps? By the end, I felt as though we'd really got somewhere with the metaphorical value of Solomon's inclination towards the bees and towards beekeeping, and not only for him finding that sense of purpose once again, but also this metaphor of all of them as workers in the hive contributing to something thing. Regardless though, whether or not the whole thing is sharpened to a neat point, it is such delicious dialogue, it is such rich character that any time spent in the company of Brandon Jacobs Jenkins writing is always remarkably satisfying. He is writing, like I said, this kind of prestige, high art soap opera in response to the great American play eliciting a symphony of stunned gasps from a rapturous audience. Purpose is another one that I think is creating very interesting conversation, intergenerational in its own way, between these different family members and talking on a lot of new and interesting fronts. I would love for this to get a production here in the UK but more so than anything else, I think that this will thrive across the us. Here comes the top 10. And this next one is probably the most visceral physiological reaction I have to a piece of theatre. Oh, yeah. That makes it sound like I was violently sick. I wasn't. I was just rendered a little bit speechless. That is what happened to me when I went to the National Theatre to go and see, inter alia, this was an extraordinary revelatory theatrical experience that left me, like I said, just awestruck. I don't remember the last occasion on which, as the lights were going down, I was sort of silently whispering to myself, oh, my God, oh my God, oh my God. And that is where I was in the final few minutes minutes of this play. I was seeing it by myself. I subsequently had to spend about 10 minutes just walking around the building of the National Theatre, just trying to return to my body. And I enjoyed the exploration of this juxtaposition of a woman who has total control in this professional environment and who cannot seem to grasp the same kind of control in her own home. I thought the script was brilliant. I thought Rosamund pike was outstanding. I thought the direction was extraordinary. First of all, the way that Rosamund pike deploys and ironing board with one hand in one go was remarkable to me. Second of all, she's doing all of this at speed while actually ironing and doing a very good job of it. Third of all, the iron becomes the telephone as she recalls the conversation with her husband and she depicts him by blowing excess steam out of the iron, literally blowing hot air. It's so good, it's so clever, it's so whimsical. It charms us before the whole thing gets difficult and philosophically challenging and asks us to listen to very difficult conversations and align ourselves with very difficult perspectives and decide where we're going to end up in the very difficult choice that's coming at the end of the whole thing. So what I didn't explain in that little excerpt was that this is the follow up from the creatives behind the multi award winning Prima Facie, this time with Rosamund pike in the lead, with a slightly expanded cast, but telling a sort of inherently similar, similar story. Everything about the set design blew my mind. I loved the direction. Rosamund pike was fierce and fantastic. It's transferring to the West End. I urge you to get tickets to go see it for yourself. Back to New York now for a long overdue musical discovery of mine. I, until a couple of months ago, had never seen the musical Batboy. But oh boy, do I know it now. This production was sensational. It packed something of a bite as well as being side splittingly funny, perhaps I should say blood drawingly funny and you know, just utterly maniacal as well. Well, this is a show that feels like it was written with the methodology of, you know, what would be the single most bizarre and insane thing to happen to this narrative in the next scene. I truly knew nothing beforehand about the direction this plot was going to take. Taylor Trench is wonderful as Edgar Batboy and to begin with he is non verbal. He's sort of Gollum from Lord of the Rings esque, naked to the waist and crawling at an alarming pace around the space and scal this set and mounting things and peeking through and sort of shrieking in this bat like fashion. But he quite quickly gets the Eliza Doolittle treatment and is able to not only speak but do so in a very loquacious and well spoken way. But the real sensational performance of the show comes from Kerry Butler who like I said was a part of the original company playing Shelley years and years ago and is now playing Meredith. This is is such a casting coup, not just because of the novelty of her now like singing the other part in the song Three Bedroom House and playing a lot of scenes on stage with her former character, but also because she's so great and it captures, I think, both because of the way that she sounds and because she was Shelley, this sense of Meredith having become jaded and you know, having regrets in her life, but also this youthful version of her that still lingers there that you can still see and still hear. I, I loved Batboy. I loved Bat Boy so much. I have been listening to Three Bedroom House on a near daily basis in the week since and the performances were incredible, as I mentioned. But everything about this production undeniably the best thing I've ever seen at New York City Centre, which is quite a high bar, it was so great. There was this perfectly pitched understanding of the tone of the whole thing. I would love for it to go to Broadway. I know it's going to be a hard sell. I know it's zany, I know it probably has more of an Off Broadway way feel to it, but City center was huge and that crowd loved that show. I am desperate to get to see this again. Then we have a show I saw in London which I think desperately needs to go to New York because I think it would be very much appreciated over there. This was a transfer from the Almeida Theater and it was the years now, as it was arriving in the West End, the years was making headlines for one particularly graphic scene that was causing audience members, from what I noticed, usually male audience members, to faint mid performance. Here were my thoughts about the play and that particular pivotal moment. By this point, we are cresting the hill of the narrative and we meet this character a little more confident, a little more established, wielding a little more power in terms of her own sexual agency, but quite quickly having to deal with the implications of that in a time period prior to the widespread availability of contraceptive birth control. Putting the triggering aspects of it aside for just one moment, the theatrical aspect of it, it is so genius because this is really the only moment in the piece where the rest of the company stand apart and they watch, stood, the four of them together, from the back corner with regret and with concern. But this is something that Romola, as the character did in the moment, truly has to endure alone. That sense of isolation feels so oppressive. The way that this section is worded did is brutal and harrowing and visceral. You can so acutely feel the pain and the detail of that process. It's in those details. For what is otherwise a very sort of black and white, not many props, inclusive production. This is a startling flash of color and like I said, it's a difficult scene, but it's also a hugely necessary scene because after we get past that, once we're out of it, you so profoundly feel the weight of what this meant for women at the time, this consequence of a pleasure to which they are entitled to by their humanity and the medical interventions not yet afforded to them. You understand what it means when the contraceptive pill then comes in. You understand what it means for her to embark on any future relationships, the relationship that she then has with her husband, with her children. The gravity of the whole thing is rooted in us having shared that incredibly painful and difficult moment with her. That whole company of the years were really extraordinary. It was a brilliant piece of theatrical storytelling with once again exemplary direction. That's becoming a running theme, especially in these next few. Just fantastic direction choice.
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Mickey Jo
Now, if I'm not mistaken, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac has appeared on this list before. But it a very different production, one created by Australian theatre maker Virginia Gay that I first saw at Fringe and then at the Park Theatre in London. And it was almost the reason why I didn't want to go see this production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, because I was like, I don't want to go and see normal Cyrano again after I saw fun, new, vibrant, queer Cyrano. But I'm glad that I did, because this new adaptation starring Adrian Lester was glorious. We turn from the comic to the tragic to the moving very steadily and with a pronounced elegance. There are really few things that can compete with Adrian Lester at the top of his game. He is such a remarkable actor and he has inherently within him such a depth of feeling, such a capacity for tension and presence like so many great actors, but also this sneaking, playful quality. And when he makes his first arrival, heckling the performance as Cyrano and honking on a horn and looming like he's the Phantom of the Opera, it's hysterical. When he first attempts a West Midlands accent later in the play, it's hysterically funny. And what really begins to pierce through the armor of his wit and his aggression and all of his assertions is this loneliness and this inherent sadness that is the way that his Cyrano is characterized. There is really captivating sword fighting and also beautiful, poignant, passionate, believable intimacy. The climax of Cyrano's introductory scene is this feat of showmanship as he is engaging in a sword fight while simultaneously executing an acrostic poem. It is legitimately pulse raising and one of the most impressive things I've seen on stage from an actor in a very long time time. And also a combination of the two real currencies of this play, which are sword fighting and poetry. Who knew one of the best nights of theatre would arrive via a prosthetic nose and legitimate heartbreak? What you didn't hear me mention in that excerpt was the way this play goes on to talk about love so thoroughly, so movingly, so robustly. Absolutely fantastic writing. Brilliantly mature, layered performances and a connecting humanity, which, even though the play retained its historic setting, spoke to, I think, everyone in the auditorium. Next up at number six, another historically set story, this time a popular musical adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel. This takes us back right to the beginning of January when I saw Oliver, exclamation point. You're listening through to the whole thing and you're thinking, God, that's a great song. Oh, that's a great song. I mean, food, glorious food as the opener alone is wonderful. Then you have have Oliver, then you have consider yourself. You have got to pick a pocket or two. You have, reviewing the situation, a brilliantly written character song. And more than half a century later, I think this still probably has to sit within the top 10 of the best ever written British musicals. Maybe the top five, maybe the top three. It's that good. And this truly is an Oliver, which feels harsher and bleaker and more dramatic and more intense. Intense for that level of focus. It is still an expansive and thorough and wonderful looking set, all covered in this dense fog and just, I keep saying bleak, but it really was just bleak and miserable and great for that. You feel acutely the danger of Oliver's circumstances and of Fagin's circumstances and of Bill's and of Nancy's. Everyone feels that little bit more. More precarious. No one feels entirely in control. This is an Oliver filled with characters living in abject poverty and on the knife's edge, as it were. From that arises this fearful quality in each of them. From that arises this tension. From that tension arises this danger, this drama and this darkness. There is a brooding and nefarious quality to this production that I have just love. So this production also continues to run at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End. I urge you to go and see it, if only because of the lighting design. This is legitimately what I've been telling people when they're like, I'm not a huge fan of the show, but I love theatre. Do I need to go and see Oliver? This has mostly been Americans, because, you know, they prefer Annie. I have been saying you have to go see this lighting design, also the cast, but the lighting design, it's so good. It was genuinely breathtaking. And it's just a really first rate production of a show that I think is as iconic as many of the other staples in the West End. If Phantom runs forever, if Les Mis runs forever and the Mousetrap, why shouldn't we have Oliver all the time in London? I would love for this production to go on and on and on. Now we find ourselves at the top five, my five favorite shows of the year. And with regards to all of the numbers here, until we get to, I would say the top three, certainly the number one slot. These could probably change from one day to the next. These could probably swap places. But it's been a mixture thus far of things that I loved with my whole heart so personally, and things that I had such an admiration for and a respect for as a piece of craft and theater. This next five fit in the middle of that Venn diagram. I loved them so much and I thought they were stunning. And the first is a play that I saw at, at Soho Place in London called Kyoto. There are a lot of people who go to the theatre to encounter human truths, but would rather not be interrupted by the inconvenience of them. And there is no question in my mind that it would not work to simply put a piece of theatre on stage that confronts audiences with the harsh reality of the climate crisis as it currently stands and demands some kind of response. So what then do you do? It focuses on event events in the past, in the years leading up to this conference in 1997. And it delivers a great story and audiences will engage with and will respond to a great story. We've seen more than enough plays where people argue around a dining room table. Here people are still arguing around a table. It's just a significantly bigger table. The big picture question being, what will it take for us as human beings to come together in spite of insurmountable differences? There are a couple of extraordinary moments, moments of argument, around word choices, around vocabulary, around punctuation. The first being a standoff between Don and the scientist who I mentioned as they trade back and forth 28 different autonomous adjectives. Now, at almost exactly the same time, is my favorite moment of the entire play because we have seen for the whole thing, without really questioning it, all of these different representatives from different places around the world, world in conversation, in dialogue, in debate. And as the conference draws on and on and on and begins to last through the night. The UN interpreters have to leave the building. And it's at this point that all of these different characters, who up until this point have all been speaking English, suddenly begin to speak in their native languages. And suddenly the dialogue continues. But no one can understand each other, and members of the audience can only follow those languages which they understand. At the time, I think I called this the best direction that I had seen in years. The detail of it, the thoughtfulness of it. And again, when seeing any political piece of theatre which so many of them are in one way or another, but one that is in conversation with an ongoing global crisis, it's sort of pointless to me if you don't leave the theatre feeling like you've been called to action, like you've been galvanized to some extent. And that's what this play brilliantly but subtly does. Now, number four is interesting because. And again, if you've listened to my worst shows of the year, you will know that the first one I mentioned was the Tempest, directed by Jamie Lloyd at Theatre Royal Drury Lane. This a few months after he had directed another Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, which undoubtedly appeared in my worst shows of 2024, Roundup, because I hated that. I was sort of concerned then about the prospect of going to see Much Ado About Nothing. But surprise, surprise, what a pivot. From the bleak, aimless misery that was the Tempest came the joyous party of a production that was Much Ado About Nothing. I wonder often what it would have been like to experience Shakespeare during his lifetime and the way that those plays were initially received, because now it's become quite academic, and the context in which most audiences meet Shakespeare for the first time is at school, school, reading it, learning about it, studying it. And it's become this historical thing. It's become this slightly inaccessible thing. Shakespeare, in his own lifetime, played to the crowds. Shakespeare offered song and dance and comedy and smut. And with this production, that gets wolf whistles, that gets cheers, that gets so much freaking laughter. It feels like this is. Is really Shakespeare having a similar kind of a reaction in 2025 to what it would have had in the very late 16th century. And that, I think, is a triumph. This audience is having a great time. The ushers are having a great time. That I always think is a good sign before a show begins, because rather than the Bleak Auditorium that we entered into for the Tempest, where the whole thing just felt inherently cold, we walk into a dark disco at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where the ushers are literally dancing around in the aisles. They are blasting this nostalgic club music in a very crowd pleasing way. Crowd pleasing are not words you have associated with Jamie Lloyd's work in some time. It's very satisfying for it to happen. Now. The through line in my review with both of those Jamie Lloyd Shakespeare productions at Drury Lane was how it would make the audience feel and how it would leave the audience feeling about Shakespeare. And I love the notion of democratizing the theatrical experience and really playing to the crowd who are going to buy tickets because of the way that you market the show and cast the show and produce the show. And the thing with the Jamie Lloyd production is when it all works and it all lines up, then it's.
- [35:40]
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- [36:59]
Mickey Jo
So good. But the time for disco dancing is over because very serious moment. Now we have reached the top three my three favorite theatrical productions from around the world in 2025 and in at number three. This one has been very talked about. It has generated an awful lot of buzz. I expect you anticipated seeing him somewhere on this list. I am talking of course about Paddington Bear and the brand new West End Production at the Savoy Theatre. Paddington the Musical. At this point I've already gone on ITV News and called this the best big new British musical since Matilda. I say big. To separate it from the likes of the Brilliant Six and Operation Mincemeat. It is magical. There's something of the Mary Poppins to it as well as there kind of always has been with Paddington. And I give the writers, that is Jessica Swale, book writer Tom Fletcher on the score, as well as director Luke Shepard, an extraordinary amount of credit for committing to telling that story in a way that is authentic in the current sociopolitical moment. You didn't think you'd hear the word socio political in a Paddington the Musical review, but guess what? You just did. And the scale of him alongside everybody else that it is, is this little Paddington sized bear on stage is the first thing that is heartwarming. And then subsequently you see him start to move around, that's the next thing you can see him breathe, then you see him blink. And then finally when he begins to talk. It's a inspiring you can spend if you choose to the next few scenes just watching Paddington in delight as he gradually begins to do more and more. It's adorable watching him sit himself down on a bed and tuck himself into it. The littlest things that shouldn't be sweet are because it's Paddington Bear. It's this very well known and very well loved character finally real before our eyes. It's this inexplicable thing that you dreamed of in childhood but learned as a jaded adult could never possibly be. So for those two hours and 40 minutes, something bigger than musical theatre storytelling is happening. Everyone is a child again. You have adults, parents, grandparents sat next to their kids watching with exactly the same wide eyed wonder and joy. I also said in that review that because of the popularity of the brand, Paddington was going to run for a long time and be a hot ticket. Regardless of how good it was. It has become a wildly hot ticket like Spicy Hot Marmalade because it's also fantastic. It's had glowing reviews, which it deserves. It's one of the strongest new British musicals we've seen in a long time. Certainly that caters to that family demographic and kind of ticks all the big West End musical theatre boxes. I wish for the most success for Paddington. It's going to be really exciting to see this probably turn into another long running show. Okie dokie. Top two time. Which shows haven't I mentioned yet? Well, the second one, continuing in the theme of more plays than musicals. Appearing on this year's list is another play from Broadway, but one that is coming to London. 2026 at the Royal Court Theatre. I saw it in New York at the Booth. This is Kimberly Bellflower's. John Proctor is the villain. Set in a classroom, responding to Arthur Miller's the Crucible. Here is why I love this show. This is not even a slow burn of a play. This is a slow boil of a play that when it reaches boiling point, continues to boil and then boils over and somehow sets fire to the entire kitchen and then eventually the house burns down out. That's what this play is. It just gets cumulatively and exponentially more exciting and engaging and the stakes get higher and higher and higher and suddenly we're looking at a completely different situation than the one that we thought we initially saw. And I just love the idea of really championing what feels like a really truthful version of that young perspective and of those characters and allowing them to lead the way with their voices and allowing their them to be right and allowing them to challenge authority. I think that's just so effing cool. And I get so energized and so excited about the idea of real young people at the Booth Theatre getting excited about these young characters, getting excited about the Crucible and, you know, really paying attention to it. But I also think that way more exciting than that is something like John Proctor is the villain. The fact that schools groups can now go and see the this and see themselves represented, see a text and a play that they can access a lot more effortlessly, that's going to get them excited about how relevant theatre can be and how cool theatre can be for audiences at the time. The parallels with the Crucible and, you know, like McCarthyism and scapegoating and witch hunts and mass hysteria may have been incredibly clear. And I think for young people studying it now, until you start to have a conversation about like the parallels with me too, and the parallels, parallels with Cancel Culture, it won't necessarily feel blisteringly relevant, but this will. And I love that. My almost 30 year old interpretation of it, I love it. I think it's fantastic. It barely matters what I think because young people are loving this and that's the most important thing. I think the moment I started to fall in love with John Proctor as the villain was in the days leading up to seeing it, when my friends and I kept noticing like groups of young women and teenage girls walking down the street talking excitedly about a play they'd just seen on Broadway. Overhearing them say, like, that's the best thing, thing I've ever seen. That was so good. And holding playbills and not needing to check what it was on the playbill because you just knew that it was John Proctor. There was this palpable buzz and enthusiasm from young audiences, which I think is so, so important. If we aren't creating work for young audiences, for the next generation of theatre, go, what the hell are we doing? And to create something that not only entices them to go to the theatre, but excites them when they get there, I think is admirable and important. It's also a fantastic play for audiences of all ages. I saw it twice so that I could watch an entire audience watch it the second time. And I can't wait to experience a London audience seeing it in 2026. Book tickets to John Proctor as the villain at the Royal Court or wherever it's being produced near you. It was actually licensed pre Broadway. So many productions have happened already. And when with that, we arrive at the number one slot. My favorite show of 2025, as I mentioned, for the past couple years in a row, this has gone to a Broadway production. I think some previous winners of my favorite shows of the year include Merrily We Roll along and I think maybe Happy Ending or Stereophonic. And this year, and this has been something of a theme with some of my favourite shows this year, it is a play rather than a musical, but it's one that I saw in the West End and I sort of gave the game away when I called this the best play I'd seen this year. It is one I saw only a few weeks ago at the Wyndham's Theatre, Eva Van Hove's production of All My Sons. I left the Wyndham's Theatre that afternoon with the clearest, most acute sense that this was easily the best thing I'd seen all year. It's one of those great American plays which is staged fairly often, not unlike Death of a Salesman, and it's something of a scathing indictment of the American dream and a reminder of the importance of community. At least that's very much what's uplifted in this particular production. A post World War II Reflection written by Arthur Miller in 1947, Wasting no Time whatsoever, very much capturing the raw grief of a nation affected by loss. There is reward in this unceasing intensity. And I felt my pulse quicken cumulatively as we were going through each moment of it. I must have breathed, I must have blinked at some point during those two hours. But I couldn't tell you whether or not I did. I was so transfixed by this utterly extraordinary theater, by every single pulse raising second, the young characters of the play, this younger generation, bear all of this guilt about the responsibility that they have to the older generation. And when combined with the ultimate truth of this narrative, the betrayal of an entire generation by their parents feels powerfully prescient. That is the answer to why we need another production of All My Sons so soon after the last. That is the answer to the too often unasked question, why this play? Why right now? It's extraordinary to me that a nearly 80 year old play could be fueled by Eva Van Hove to speak with such articulate, inescapable meaning about the exact times that we are living in. I was was blown away by this completely. And what a journey to go from opening night. The last West End production, directed by Eva Van Hove, being my least favourite show, I believe, of last year. I've lost all sense of time by last year I mean 2024 to all my sons being the best, I think inarguably of 2025. I knew instantly that that was my favourite thing. I'd seen incredible performances. It deserves a whole handful of awards. Awards. I am desperately eager to go and see it again. I know that tickets have become very expensive. I would be shocked if it didn't try and perpetrate some sort of a Broadway transfer. Perhaps this season, perhaps next. It's genuinely one of those really stunning pieces of theatre I would urge you to see however you can. And again has this dialogue enters into conversation with the audience about the world that we are living in now. That, it seems, is something I increasingly, and you know, challenging global times, really search for for in these productions that I'm seeing. Theatre is more predisposed to do that than any other medium. You've gathered us together. We are sharing a space in this one room and giving you our undivided attention. What are you going to say? How are you going to make us feel connected once we've done that? Which is a good enough way to end this roundup of my favorite shows of 2025. Thank you so much for listening. Perhaps you got the chance to see some of these as well. Please share your thoughts about them in the comments down below as well as your own list of your favorite shows that you saw in the last 12 months. Of course there will be many more shows for me and many more reviews to look forward to over the next 12 months. So to make sure you don't miss any of my reviews in 2026. Make sure you're subscribed to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Turn on notifications. It's the button that looks like a bell so YouTube lets you know every time I share a new video or go follow me on podcast platforms. As always, thank you for listening and I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagy day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theater. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
- [47:29]
Verizon Announcer
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