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MickeyJoTheatre
the worst shows Mickey-Jo saw in 2025 | reviews of disappointing plays and musicals from the last year
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- [00:00]
Christy
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- [00:47]
Mickey Jo
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- [01:47]
Mickey Jo
Sometimes I'll be watching a show and I'll think, do you know what? This is gonna make the roundup and not the good one. The important thing I think to remember is that every mistake, every misfire is actually just the opportun to learn to grow and to create something even stronger. And also the chance to be featured in Mickey Jo's worst shows of the Year Roundup. Am I right? Should I invest in a tax deductible confetti cannon? Is that something I need? Oh my God. Hey welcome back everybody to my theatre themed YouTube channel or to your favorite podcast platform. I'm currently reaching you from that void of time at the end of December. And because I am Wearing something vaguely celebratory. I could have worn anything. For this video, I chose a bow tie. That's a choice I made for myself. Why? And drenched in ominous red lighting, it can only mean one. It's time for me, a theatre critic here on social media, to tell you about the shows which I saw this year that absolutely sucked. Obviously, that's a joke, though admittedly one whose humour is rooted in a small quantity of truth. I am indeed going to be sharing with you 15 of the shows that I enjoyed the least this year, the majority of which I reviewed here on social media. And I know that this is a controversial way to round out the year. I am, of course, going to be sharing my 15 favourite shows of the year subsequently as well. I feel like you have to do it, do it this way around. I can't finish with the disappointments. I can't be like, I loved all of these things, but this is what I can't do that. Second, this is what I hated. No, we have to start with hate. And then. And then let. Let fondness and celebration bloom and sort of eclipse the fact that I was ever negative in the first place. I also think, and I saw someone the other day questioning why people were doing worst show of the year roundups. And it's a fair enough thing to ask, but I often think there's actually more for theatre makers and audiences alike to learn and understand from a negative review. I think you learn more from the mistakes, from the misfires, because it's hard to replicate success. It's often harder to quantify. This is why this thing works. And here's a lesson that you can take from that. It's way easier to look at something that isn't working and figure out how to avoid that particular pitfall. And, boy, do we have some pitfalls to glance back on today. And in preparing this list, I did glance back at some of my worst shows of the year list from the last few years, and I have to say I was thinking back on some of those shows, thinking those weren't that bad this year. I genuinely did struggle to enjoy all of the shows listed here for one reason or another. I often say the worst thing that a show can be is boring, but I think that's actually untrue. I think the worst thing a piece of theatre can be is disappointing, because boring. You know, you just waste a couple hours of your life and then you feel this enormous sense of relief to get to leave the theatre disappointing. That's going to haunt you and irritate you for weeks if you're anything like me. Now, of course, if you would like to hear my full reviews of any of the shows mentioned here, then you can find them wherever you are, seeing my face or hearing my voice. And if you want to hear all of my reviews heading into the new year, of which there will be sure many positives and many negatives, then make sure you're subscribed right here. Turn on notifications so you don't miss any new video or follow me on podcast platforms or other social media apps. In the meantime, let me tell you all about my least favorite shows of 2025. So when I do Best of, I am going to do a numbered countdown finishing with my absolute favorite show. I don't tend to do that with the worst of because I think it sort of adds insult to injury. So we're going to do these chronolog, which means we begin with a show I saw in January 2025, almost a year ago. And yet the memory endures. Now, admittedly, this is one where I had a little bit of a sense of what was awaiting me, because this had already been reviewed poorly by the time that I got to go and see it. This was Jamie Lloyd's production of the Tempest, starring Sigourney Weaver at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. I had many thoughts about this one, including its impact on audiences. Here is what I had to say almost 12 months ago, presented with such an exciting variety, themes and tone. You know, we have the malice of it and we have the romance of it. We have the comedy of it and we have the darkness and we have the magic. It is, for some perplexing reason, just relentlessly bleak. Pressed to summarize this, regrettably, I would tell you that it is fatally dull. It had this palpable heaviness to it throughout, and it evaded the ideas of wit or charm. There is little romance to this. There is little levity to this. There is no joy to this whatsoever. This is a tempest that happens entirely by night. There is no sunrise to this production. Even at the end, as things turn for the more optimistic I told you, ultimately it's a comedy because things end well. But nobody told Jamie Lloyd that in his version of the Tempest. Technically, we're on an island, but we may as well be in purgatory. And I worry that those people, those same people who didn't wait to the interval to leave halfway through, no, no, left amidst the ongoing first act parties next to me, parties behind me, multiple people walking out of this production. I'M worried that those people are going to walk out of that theater and never walk back in to another Shakespeare play, possibly to another theater. I think I said this in the Romeo and Juliet review as well, but we have a responsibility to our audiences, and productions like this alienate people. I wasn't joking when I spoke about the people that actually stood up halfway through the first act and sidled out along the row to leave the show, not even staying until the interval. That's gotta hurt. But thankfully, Theatre Royal Jury Lane's such a massive auditorium, they probably couldn't see them from the stage or thought they were ghosts, of which there are several. I wonder if the ghosts enjoyed the Tempest. That would be a real damning review if the ghosts didn't like it. Next on the list, we are traveling to Reading Rep Theatre in Berkshire for a production of the Maids. Listen, I'm not against the idea of a play which blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, but sometimes it feels as though they're really blurring the line between theatrical enjoyment and the sensation that you might be having a stroke. Now, this was scandalous when it was first published. It tells the story of two maids, their sisters, who envision what it might be like to kill their mistress and free themselves from servitude. But their fantasies get more and more elaborate and soon enough the possibility of committing legitimate homicide becomes all too tempting for reasons that are at best ambiguous. And that is the problem, perhaps for me, with the material which very much lives in the realm of theatre of the absurd. Not a genre that I contend well with, I'll be completely honest here. But also I think with this production, which to my mind doesn't do enough to clarify the difference between fantasy and reality. Honestly, it just felt like we were dusting while we waited for Godot. And there were elements of the thing that I enjoyed. Anna Popplewell and Charlie Oscar as these two maids. These two sisters found extraordinary emotional intensity and commitment. And the set design by Kat Fuller, I immediately thought was terrific. We looked at this corner of an apartment realized in perspective, juxtaposing stylish high end furniture with the idea of a padded cell. A brilliant metaphorical idea, but again, emblematic of the confusion between fantasy and reality. Gripping at times, if only because of its insidious twists. It found a couple of inadvertently comic moments, but for the most part it was disappointingly baffling. This very nearly escaped the list, if only because I think I pretty successfully just erased it from my memory. And I do always feel a small amount of Remorse. Featuring small venues, regional venues, on a list like this, what I will say is, stay tuned for the best of list. Not everything I saw at Reading Rep was disappointing. Now, though I disliked those first two shows, I think my rage burned just a little brighter when it came to this next one. And it was not helped whatsoever by the fact that London had two different productions of the same play, two very different adaptations within a few weeks of each other. I'm talking about Oedipus. Those feuding Oedipuses, I guess, that we had back at the start of 2025. First show of the year, I saw Robert Ike's version. A few weeks later, I headed to the Old Vic to see if I would enjoy that quite as much. And newsflash, everybody, I did not. Oh, that guy. Oh yeah, I killed that guy. Just didn't know who he was. And listen, we've all been there. And hell, even the shepherd doesn't think it's Oedipus's fault because the king said some nasty words to him and wouldn't get out of his way. That apparently is justification enough for death. And I hope that particular shepherd never ends up in traffic court. But this, for me, was a persistent and significant problem with this material, because what the I did so well is it afforded Oedipus and Jocasta enough plausible ignorance. It was entirely conceivable that they wouldn't have put all of the pieces together until the moment that they do. When the penny eventually drops for Jocasta, Jocasta falls to the floor in a moment of devastated realization. I'll remind you that most important moment of the play, the one that we all know is coming, the one that we are waiting to witness. And Oedipus simply is not on the same wavelength as anyone else in the room. He hears all of this and goes, oh, so the shepherd is my father. Then who's my mother? Shakes the man asks him multiple times. And in his performance, there is no sense whatsoever of this being born of any kind of denial or desperation. He just literally seems dumb. And you hate to come down on the sides of religious zealots, but after that moment, I'm a little like, maybe the man should be publicly shamed and have his eyes plugged out, because he's clearly not fit to rule two kingdoms, let alone one. The grandeur of the tone that Ella Hickson is also trying to consecrate here is very at odds with some of the more flippant and frankly, silly exchanges between these characters. And he says, no don't worry, don't worry. She's hanged herself in almost that exact intonation. I literally laughed into my hands. Needless to say, this is not where we ought to be when it comes to Greek tragedy. This without even mentioning the polarizing dance elements of the production, though I have heard from other people who really enjoyed it always, you know, worth remembering that these are just my subjective opinions. And there were from other critics, great reviews for many of the shows on this list. Now, when it comes to some of these, I really have nobody to blame but myself because I am occasionally pre warned. And this next show had an initial life in New York before coming over to London, and I had already heard some fairly damning things about it. However, it had been reworked. I was curious. I went to go and see it anyway. Here is what I thought of White Rose. This is a very important story to tell. It's one that needs to be handled with a huge amount of care, which I feel, and I'm sorry to say this is packaged within generally subpar writing. We resort to a lot of metaphorical platitudes. We talk a lot about the stars and the sky. I look to the stars and I find comfort there. And every night when I go to sleep. And all of this stuff, we've heard it, we've heard it before. And none of it really speaks to their situation. None of it speaks to the world in which they find themselves, which is a very striking and interesting one. We have talked about war, we have talked about revolution, goodness knows, on stage before in musical theater. But so rarely do we hear it from the perspective of Germans living through the Second World War and what they think about all of this. The song Sophie New, which I believe they added for this London production, it opens the second act. The whole thing is completely unearned. You can't open the second act with this epic ballad trio. It comes out of nowhere. It's not established. It would be a really winning moment if it came way later. In the second act, he sings a song. It's something like, they won't care what you have to show them until you show them that you care. It's all about the nobility of being a teacher. It just comes in the wrong moment. Have the students sing about how great the teacher is. Don't have him singing about himself. That's not how you do to sir with love. He can't toussur with love himself. And in general, there are just too many characters who sing big power ballads. There are too many lyrical ideas. And this is Really, I think an implication of the sort of shapeless narrative where the they keep saying, we've got to do something, we're going to do something, the time is now, we won't be silent. And they keep being on that precipice of action for almost the entire duration of the show and they eventually do something and then they're immediately arrested. And speaking of New York, these are not just shows from the UK. Once more, in 2025, I flew across the Atlantic on several occasions, with my second trip being one in spring, to see as many of last season's newly opening shows as possible, including a new star vehicle for the wickedly talented Idina Menzel Redwood A Musical about Trees I'm sure that this has the capacity to be very powerful and very personally affecting. For the most part though, I just don't really know if there's a strong enough story here. And at its most basic, a musical needs two things to be successful. It needs a good story and good songs. And I would contend, disappointingly, that this doesn't really have either. This, to me just feels a little bit tuneless and lyrically doesn't really feel like it's offering these staggering insights into the grieving process or indeed into the majesty of her circumstances. The score is also wildly unmemorable, and I would say in general with this production there are going to be more visuals that stay with you than anything that you've heard. And she is, for a brief moment, belting while flying above the stage, just like she did in her Tony Award winning performance in wicked just over 20 years ago. Which, you know, is novel, but it doesn't make up for the fact that we barely have a plot here, at least not a plot that is fit in any way for musical theater. This might be an interesting play. There is nothing whatsoever about this story that says to me that it needs to be a musical. If Julia Roberts 15 years ago had wanted to do this as a film, then I get it. It feels a little bit like a Lifetime movie. Like Eat, Pray Tree, whatever. Redwood Gone but not forgotten. Except for the score, which I can confidently tell you entirely forgotten. Could not sing you a bar from that show. Now, that trip to New York lasted a couple weeks. When I got back, as is so often the case, I had a lot of shows that had opened in the UK that I needed to catch up on, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which I had been really excited about because I'd been to a very intriguing presentation of it at a rehearsal event and it was a really dynamite Cast like Star Studded this was a regional premiere of a new musical happening at the Theatre Royal Bath, and I didn't officially review it, but by the time that I made it to the show it had already been reviewed by the national press and the verdict was, shall we say, less than positive, which was sort of staggering to me because I've been so intrigued by the material and the cast and the creatives. It was directed by John Doyle. I was sort of eyeing this and I probably forecast it as a show to look out for in my like what to see in 2025 video. Back at the start of last year as a show that could go from regional to the West End to Broadway even, I thought this was going to be be really fantastic. And it really was not. Now, since I don't have a previous review to cut to here, I will share with you a few of my thoughts. This is based on the TV show of the same name and Alfred Hitchcock himself is invoked and referenced but never portrayed. His style, however, his iconic style is felt throughout the entire evening, which is a series of little vignettes following a couple of not particularly interwoven storylines from what I remember, but various noir, sinister, suspenseful, murderous encounters between different characters played by an admittedly fantastic cohort of performers. Really extraordinary cast for this show, who on occasion were able to elevate the material from the page and bring us something slightly more compelling. There were flashes of real excitement in this show, but the overall product was something bizarrely dreary and if the whole thing had been been a little more suspenseful, had been worthy of Hitchcock, perhaps then it might have been a little more watchable. It's another of those musicals for which there was really no justification for it being a musical in the first place. But we have more shows to discuss and as the weather was getting warmer, the next one takes us back to Broadway to go and see a musical revival. I am talking.
- [17:29]
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- [17:59]
Christy
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- [18:47]
Mickey Jo
About Floyd Collins There is a necessary claustrophobic quality to a show like Floyd Collins where he spends almost the entirety of the thing trapped so tightly in a cave collapse that he cannot move a single limb within audible reach of the other characters in the show, but not physically able to be extricated. That needs to feel, I think, to a certain extent intense and claustrophobic and intimate. And Lincoln center is one of the more open spaces with this sort of thrust amphitheater wraparound seating layout that they could possibly have found. Not only that, but the staging is almost entirely bare. They do not literally depict Jeremy Jordan being crushed under any kind of rock. Instead, he lies in a very still reclined position on a rock that looks a little bit like a sun lounger or a business class airplane seat in the near horizontal position, which works about as well as it sounds like it does. Not even in the center of the stage, by the way, over at the side of the stage, literally moving him from our focus off to the side and pushing it to one side so that we can talk about all of the characters back up above ground speculating about how best to save him. Doing that, I think, strips the central component of this show of a lot of its tension and a lot of the fear around it. We know this is a stressful situation because Taylor Trench's face keeps telling us that it is, and we hear repeatedly the nature of the exact way in which he is trapped in this cave system. We just don't see it, nor do we see anything that can really allow us to envision it. Now on that same trip, I believe I went from New York to Massachusetts, Massachusetts to Chicago, Chicago back to New York, and then finally to New Jersey to just about catch Disney's the Little Mermaid at Paper Mill Playhouse, a venue where I have enjoyed productions on a handful of occasions. This was not one of them. Once again, I did not officially review this one. And a big part of that is because I think a lot of the shortcomings of this production weren't actually Paper Mill Playhouse's fault or the fault of this production or this cast or this creative team. Because despite having for years wanted to see the Little Mermaid on stage, it has never been professionally produced produced in the UK for whatever reason. And now I suspect we might know the reason. I had never realized just how poor the material is for the stage production. And it's a wonderful film with great material, beautiful songs, effortlessly theatrical songs. We talk often about, you know, the connection between Alan Menken and Howard Ashman's gorgeous I Want song, Somewhere that's Green, and the gorgeous Part of youf World, which remains one of the best I want songs ever written. Of course, written for the screen rather than the stage, but it's still an I Want song. It sort of typifies the genre. And throughout the film, the music is gorgeous, the lyrics are witty and clever and passionate. And it's this story of longing, this fish out of water story, the original fish out of water story, I guess. Is that where that comes from? That could be where that comes from. One which has always been something of a challenge to stage because, you know, so much of it takes place underwater. And how do you replicate the effect of swimming on stage? Originally on Broadway, they tried to do it with Heelys. I thought that was actually done quite well at Paper Mill Playhouse, but in a production whose staging was otherwise sort of undeniably lackluster in comparison with an inexpensive community theater production. My biggest issue, however, all of the changes made to the screenplay for the book of the stage musical. I have no idea why so many changes needed to be made in the first place. The Little Mermaid's a great movie. Almost every scene was achieving more or less the same objectives, but rewritten and very poorly. Now after this, a few weeks go by and I continue to travel and August takes me, as it always does, does to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. And from one year to the next, I keep changing my mind about whether or not to include fringe shows in my end of year ranking, and I often don't because they are generally emerging creatives and low budgets. But occasionally you encounter a piece of theatre that objectively ought to know better. This year it was a show called World's Greatest Lover. We're going to cut now to My full review from the streets of Edinburgh amidst a theatrical marathon. Well, they say that love hurts. And unfortunately, so did this show. I saw World's Greatest Greatest Lover at the Edinburgh Fringe, 2025 at the Pleasants Courtyard. This is an American musical that is hoping to emulate the success of other shows like Six by almost entirely appropriating that show's structure. In this, four different Lotharios from history are brought together by St. Valentine in order to learn from each other and to help save love. Because love is dying. And despite the clutching so clearly at Six's very successful formula, what they have missed in doing so is that there is a terrific substance and a message behind all of that in a show like Six. And that is what is sadly lacking here. Because for all of the many, many similar songs in this show, ultimately the enduring message about what they can learn from each other is that the likes of Casanova and the Marquis de Sade need to learn to appreciate the little things lie less and not give up on love. And with that, love is saved. And that is not entirely true because it also takes a handful of musical performances with mostly indistinguishable melodies, generic lyrics and unearned modulations. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of talent on stage, but it is squandered in a show that has no understanding of the fact that there needs to be something more behind the boy band of it all. Needless to say, World's Greatest Lover is not the greatest musical at the Edinburgh fringe. When I tell you the entire format for this show was a boy band made up of deceased historical figures sharing a purgatorial space, taking turns to sing about their exploits and having to try and find a shared understanding within the confines of a one act musical. You start to understand what I mean now. I guess we got through the rest of the summer without any major disappointments, but we eventually arrive at a new production of an oft produced Shakespearean play, maybe the one I have seen produced the most times, and one which even before I went to go and see it, I wasn't particularly looking forward to, just because I didn't know why we needed it. Did yet another production of Othello so soon after the last. Here's what I had to say about the show and the very puzzling press night audience response I actually wrote down here. I'd like to read this out to you too. Little reminder that we are accelerating towards a devastating, violent injustice against women. Do we care so little for the death of this innocent woman? That we are in stitches about the whole situation. That is not what this play is meant to be. It's not a comedy. Even as Desdemona is being strangled by her husband in their marital bed and she is pleading with him, let me live tonight, murder me tomorrow. Even that is getting a little bit of a laugh from the audience, which I find to be a huge, major shortcoming of this production. By that point, our collective hearts should be in our throats. We shouldn't be chuckling about it. The majority of the thing is sort of fatally static, structured only around the arrivals of different characters into a sort of a formation. The whole thing is very symmetrically directed across the stage, as though we arrive, have a conversation with a minimal shift in the power dynamic and not nearly enough emotional conference between these characters. All of which makes the dialogue in these long scenes start to feel particularly tedious. Now we have reached the final five theatrical disappointments of the year. And these are all within recent memory, so you may recall them the next being one of Broadway's more high profile flops of 2025. It was set to run through very early 2026, but it brought its early closing date earlier amidst poor sales. I am talking about the perhaps misguided new musical, the Queen of Versailles. And with an awful lot to say about it, this is what I think the show's biggest problem was. This musical, depicting someone controversial at the best of times, certainly in the current political and financial moment, seems to strive to make a deliberately apolitical choice when it comes to how her story is going to be told. Because as far as the material goes, she isn't skewered, she isn't depicted in. In a harsh light. It tends more positive, largely because of Kristin Chenoweth's depiction of her. But it feels like this has been conceived as a show where two sides of the aisle, politically speaking, can sit side by side in the same theatre in the orchestra section. And one person who represents half of the audience can walk away going, gosh, what a cautionary tale. What a great reminder of the reality that money can't buy you happiness and that this is not something that we should struggle, strive for, that this is no way to live. And the person sat next to them, the other half of the audience behind them. Perhaps from a more conservative background, perhaps Republicans could walk out of that theater and say, wow, what a woman. You know, she just kept on going, what an incredible life. What a fantastic performance from Kristin Chenoweth. Let's go get a chick fil a and kick a minority. I don't know. It just feels as though the show is leaving room for interpretation so as to to not alienate half of its potential demographic. Which is unfortunate, because alienating a large amount of its demographic may in fact be something that already happened before it started previews. I spoke before about lessons to be learned in each instance, and the Queen of Versailles reminds us that the work that is being produced exists within the context of that particular community, whether that community is a small local one or the United States of America. Now, most of the shows on this list were pretty evenly spaced throughout the year. This next one happened very shortly after the Queen of Versailles. I am still on Broadway and I was deeply excited to go and see the new Broadway revival of Chess. What if I use this 80 chess timer to alternate.
- [28:32]
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- [29:02]
Mickey Jo
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- [29:22]
Christy
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- [29:31]
Mickey Jo
Terms Good and bad things about this production. We'll do the bad first. Okay, there we go. So the entire production is deeply misguided, has lost any sense of the show's identity, and offers barely anything for fans of the material to enjoy. Good thing. So while it's hard, the show has gone from being an allegory about the Cold War via this tense chess match to a story about the Cold War happening because of this chess match, or developing because of this chess match, or resting on the fate of this ridiculous Chess match. And to my mind, mind, that evidence is two things. One is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nuance of this material and the subtlety of this material, and that the chess game is meant to be representative and not actually connected to the events that are happening at the same time. And also an inherent mistrust of the material. You can hear this in Bryce Pinkham's undermining dialogue as they try desperately to throw bad pantomime jokes at it. Just lazy, topical political gags that swipe at either side of the political spectrum just to try and make somebody throughout the theater laugh in the hopes that, you know, anyone's going to enjoy that one. Here's a Biden joke for the orchestra. If you didn't like the Reagan one I told five minutes ago, it's just so clear to me between its two outings on Broadway that they just don't trust the story of Chess. And I think that's a real shame. The arbiter tells the audience early on, you're going to think this is ludicrous. And so, unsurprisingly, we do. If you give everyone the permission not to take this seriously and suggest it even then, that's exactly what's going to happen. This one broke my heart a little bit because I was really hoping for an exciting new reworking of Chess. I do so deeply believe that Broadway just doesn't trust this material or particularly know what to do with it. I also believe, and there are a lot of people in the comment section of that particular review who disagree with me, that alongside various other reworkings of Chess that have happened previously, honestly, this is by far the worst version of the material I've ever seen. Interestingly, all of the other productions that we've mentioned so far were limited runs that have ended. Chess is the only one on this list which continues to run and does so quite successfully. Props to you, Chess. Now, in the final two weeks before I took a little festive break, I saw 12 consecutive days of shows, many of which I thoroughly enjoyed, and, as you might expect, a few of which I did not. And it was actually a Saturday afternoon when I went to go and see the stage musical adaptation of of Freaky Friday. Here are some of the thoughts that I had. Not only is it a little jarring for audiences expecting this to be a direct adaptation of the film, but also I think it sort of inhibits its own ability to land a really emotionally meaningful and connecting conclusion. And by and large, it is the score from Tom Kitt which is the redeeming quality of the thing more so than the book. But I can't say that I was all the way in love with all of the lyrics necessarily. And if we take a look at this early number, Just One Day, as an example of that, it's the kind of lyric that makes my eyes roll all into the back of my skull, at which point I can't see anything that's happening on stage. But she sings, while I wish for just one Monday or a Friday to be free. And I hate it. I hate it so much. I'm so sorry. It would be admittedly worse to be, like, if only I could be free for, I don't know, a Friday. Which is almost what this lyric is. He is in charge of the list of items that people have to find in the Hunt, which is the scavenger hunt. Oh, my God, there's a song about this. And it felt like a full eight minutes later when he was still coming back on and there were, like, more modulations, I was like, oh, that was a long part of dialogue. We're still in the song. We haven't left the song yet. It's like we've been driving through this act for 25 minutes. What do you mean we're still in this song? What do you mean we haven't left Chicago yet with Freaky Friday? I just don't really know who it's for because it's a weird one to pitch for, like, school productions. But that honestly feels like the caliber of the material. And listen, I don't regret going to see it because I will always travel to go and see Rebecca Locke on stage. And that might have been where the list ended if it wasn't for the penultimate day of theatre going that I had in 2025, when I traveled to a venue I'm very, very fond of, upstairs at the Gatehouse in North London, to go and see a show. I'm very fond of their festive offering, a new revival of the musical Pippin. Honestly, seeing Pippin done in a theater above a pub in the week before Christmas is exactly my kind of festive programming. And having seen Video Game Pippin and Hippie Pippin, it's this kind of a production that I'm always aching for, one which trusts the material enough not to hide it behind some kind of a concept. That being said, I do still feel like any new production of this admittedly abstract musical ought to be able to say something other than this is probably what the Broadway revival would have looked like if nine people were doing it above A pub dubiously. And that kind of begins to walk us towards the problems that I had with this new production of Pippin Upstairs at the Gatehouse, which has been directed and choreographed by Amanda Knorr, which is essentially that any creative vision here felt neither cohesive nor particularly particularly persuasive. And there were some striking moments of staging and choreography, but they didn't feel as though they were emerging amidst any compelling creative vision for the show. Too often they also felt sort of explicitly lifted from previous productions. There were strong elements with the design, but they didn't feel part of a cohesive aesthetic. You could say the same thing about the performances. Lewis Edgar was a fine voiced Pippin, but neither the show's tone nor its accents were coming from the same place. And Emily Freiberg's leading player, disempowered by some really unfortunate costuming choices, was never quite convincingly by encouraged command. Admittedly, it's never a bad day when I get to hear this score and a lot of people think this is one of those troubled musicals that is always going to leave audiences as unfulfilled as its protagonist. But I disagree, and I think there's a lot that this material can say. Unfortunately, on this occasion it feels like it was the creative team who needed a stronger leading player. I don't think I've ever seen a fully staged version of Pippin. That has all the way worked for me, but for the most part when I've seen the show, it's had a bold concept and this one really didn't. And listen, the landscape right now for fringe theater in the UK is a very challenging one. And as I review this production, I'm very mindful of the constraints of these smaller venues. However, that is just as often an opportunity for innovation and creativity. We didn't have that here. Or to be a little kinder, at the very least, not nearly enough of it. Now, I told you I saw that on my penultimate day of theatre going. I also told you that these were going to be in a chronological order. But just like I did last year, I will sort of break that just a little bit. Because you know what, if a show is going to feature on this list, maybe it feels like a little bit of an accolade aid to be the number one show on Mickey Joe's Worst Shows of 2025. I singled out one individual show as the most frustrating last year. And this year, the more I think about it, it's probably this one. I will give you a brief moment to guess what did I hate the most this year? Well, the answer takes us back to Broadway for another musical revival. A show I know, a show I love. But not when you do it like this. I am talking, of course, about the last five years. I recently saw the Broadway production of the Last Five Years starring Nick Jonas and Adrian Warren, and I'm still hurting. We have this slightly puzzling graphic in which they project the words his and hers like you're shopping for towels at a department store. But really, it's some desperate sense of suggesting to the audience what is actually happening here. For those people in the room who don't know what the story of the last five years is and don't know how to engage with this show, you have to imagine at this point in the show's life, there are a lot of people seeing it on Broadway who already know that hers is moving backwards, his is moving forwards. But for those that don't, they're about to spend a very puzzling 90 minutes. And that's because all of the traditional storytelling tools which have been deployed in order to convey this to the audience without ever telling them in the script and allowing them to infer from context are absent from this production or actively undermined. To that end, they also distribute this this is a song list that confusingly tries to shift show the how the show works in terms of the journey from year one to year five and the order in which you hear the songs. This is why you have to label your axes, because this document makes as much sense as the show, which is not much. There's a whole array of lights on the back wall making up for what is a pretty empty looking playing space. The show still does not feel big enough for a Broadway stage and these performances don't do enough to make up for that. Overall, the problem with this show is that as a piece of theatrical storytelling telling, it's really bad. But simply as a showcase of the score, it's also disappointing, and I could almost excuse a production this deeply confusing if the two of them sounded great and were giving great performances. But I don't think either of them are. Neither of them are giving the best version of the last five years that we've seen on stage ever. And you know what? I'm still hurting actually slightly triggering re watching that footage in order to put this together. But many, many lessons, considerable lessons to be learned from the misguided Broadway production of the last five years, as indeed there are with all of the shows featured on this list. And while I think I got pretty good at avoiding some of the most disappointing theatrical ventures of the year, and by looking out for a certain quantity of red flags, I certainly stumbled into a few others. However, as I told you before, that's just my opinion and I would love to hear yours. If you loved any of the shows that I featured in Video this this list, let us know why in the comments. And of course, since you all have your own opinions as well, I would be very curious to hear about some of your biggest theatrical disappointments of 2025 and the reasons why. Share your thoughts down below and make sure that you're subscribed here with the notifications turned on or following me on podcast platforms so you don't miss the imminent roundup of my favorite shows of the year and thereafter. Stay tuned for more Reviews coming in 2026. In the meantime, I hope that you've enjoyed listening to some of my favorite thoughts from the last 12 months, and I hope, as always, that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theater oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
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