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Why is CLUELESS closing? | The reason the new musical is ending its West End run early
00:20:07
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- [00:00]
Ben
Ben hadn't had a decent night's sleep in a month, so during one of his restless nights, he booked a package trip abroad on Expedia. When he arrived at his beachside hotel, he discovered a miraculous bed slung between two trees and fell into the best sleep of his life. You were made to be rechargeable. We were made to package flights and hotels and hammocks for less. Expedia made to travel.
- [00:30]
MultiCare
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- [01:20]
Mickey Jo
Yellow background lighting? Check. 90s boy band hairstyle? Check. Clearly we're ready to talk about Hamilton. As if let's talk about Clueless. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening to this on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a professional theatre critic and social media content creator and today we are going to be talking through the emerging news, the breaking theatrical news here in the UK that the West End musical adaptation of the hit 90s teen comedy musical Clueless will conclude its run earlier than planned at the Trafalgar Theatre. This, I believe, has yet to be officially confirmed. I haven't received a press release, but it is already being reported on by a couple of major news outlets, including the stage and whatsonstage.com nothing as of yet on the show's own social pages, but it has been taken off sale after a certain date, essentially confirming the news. And I'd heard it through the grapevine that the cast may have been notified earlier today. And if that in and of itself seems a little bit bizarre to anyone, it just boils down to the fact that no one is necessarily working on a weekend as far as the PR team goes. Or they are, but they don't want to make this news story a whole big thing. Anyhow, this may be coming as a surprise to you. Clueless, after all, only opened at the Trafalgar Theatre in the West End earlier this year around February. And so I'm going to be talking through why it is that the show is already closing and what this can tell us about the economy of the West End. This is kind of our third shock closure in the last few months after Tina, the Tina Turner musical at the Old Witch, which, you know, had had a decent natural lifespan and I think is largely unrelated to this, but also the premature closure of Mean Girls at Savoy, which is inextricably linked, I think, to the closing of Clueless being inherently similar shows with obviously similar demographics. And so we're definitely going to talk through a comparison between those two, and there are a handful of other factors going into this closing notice as well. This is all, of course, just based on my own insight and speculation from my own perspective. If there's anything that you would like to add in the comments down below, or if you'd just like to share your feelings about Clueless the Musical, or offer a statement of support for the cast, for the crew, everyone affected by the closing of this show, then feel free to do so at this time. Ahead of the rest of the video, I would like to offer thoughts for the cast, for the crew, for everyone working inside and beyond the Trafalgar Theatre on this show, and everyone who is going to be affected by its early closure, everyone who understandably is going to be disappointed by this news, as well as the fans who are going to be sad that the show is closing. But this is also the reality of the theater industry and in particular in the West End, where we see a lot of turnover at these venues. When one show closes, it means another show is bound to open, and there are already potentially two more shows waiting in the wings to head into the Trafalgar Theatre before the end of the year. And by the end of this video, I will either tell you or imply what they might be. In the meantime, let's talk about Clueless the musical and why it's closing. So let's talk through the details now. Clueless began preview performances at the Trafalgar Theatre earlier this year in February 2025. Having done a small pre West End run at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley, it officially opened on 13 March 2025. It was originally scheduled to run through 14 June, but it subsequently extended its run through March 2026, an extension which it's obviously not going to be able to complete. It's closing on the 23rd of August, curiously, a week before the end of August and just a little before the end of the school summer holidays, which is, you know, great business for the West End. They have not only families going to London, they also have a lot of international tourism. So it's a peculiar time for a show to close. Usually a lot of limited runs over that time will try and run into the beginning of September, just like how stuff running over Christmas will run into the first week of January and then close, which is also why you see a lot of shows closing in early January, as I suspect we might next year. And unless the show is really hemorrhaging money, which I suspect it isn't and doesn't anticipate doing in the final week of August, I dare say that the reason for this is because there is a new tenant coming into the Trafalgar Theatre promptly that needs that little bit of turnaround time. And we've seen this happen before more often on Broadway than in the West End. But priority can sometimes be given to a show that the theatre own think is going to do better business. And in this instance, the theater owners are also, I believe, the primary producers of Clueless. And, you know, it's worth saying at this time, they, from what I hear, had an awful lot of faith in this show. I don't know whether they thought it had the capacity to be the next Heathers, the next Legally Blonde, but the powers that be definitely believed in Clueless. So it's sad to see that it hasn't lived up to its full potential and it's potential that they've really been trying to achieve for it on stage for a very long time. This is the third major incarn of Clueless, with predecessors having been US productions and workshop productions that had an original score and then turned into a jukebox version. And now this has a new original score by Katie Tunstall. And timing wise, it definitely seemed like this and other similar shows had been waiting for Heathers to finish at the other palace in order to open. Heathers, having opened a few years ago before repeatedly being remounted in London and touring around the country and kind of monopolizing that teen movie musical audience. But, and here's the interesting thing, has the volume of Heathers and the way in which it was produced kind of given a false indication of just how widespread and financially viable that particular audience and that particular demographic might be. So obviously the answer to the question, why is Clueless closing so much earlier than originally planned? Is because it wasn't selling well enough. If it was selling successfully, then it would continue, especially being produced by the theater owners. But what we want to figure out here is why the show wasn't selling. After all, wasn't Heather's a huge success in the uk? Well, when it first at the Other palace, yes. But Heathers has done deceptively little time in actual West End theatres, even with its second West End run, when it returned to the Theatre Royal Haymarket. That was during the time of theatrical social distancing, so they weren't selling the venue at full capacity. When it subsequently returned to at Soho Place, it was not selling particularly well. And even in a handful of its touring venues, although it managed to find appeal around the country with teenage musical theatre fans who do indeed live around the country, and who all managed to know what Heathers was because of the big impression that it made on social media, because perhaps of the fan favorite performers who it had cast along the years. That wasn't necessarily a sizable enough audience to fill multiple performances at regional venues all around the country. And the bulk of its time spent in London was at the other Palace, a smaller off West End venue, and it had multiple return engagements there. There were a lot of fans who were going back again and again and again. And what I'm wondering is, did the longevity of Heather's and the sort of range geographically of its footprint and the number of different productions give a false sense of its financial, especially to West End productions that are going to be more expensive to run than it has ever been. And Mean Girls is a terrific example of this. This seemed like another show that was ostensibly waiting for Heathers to close so that they could finally open in the West End. They opened at the Savoy and they ended up closing after just one year, which was very surprising to me. I went on record multiple times to say I thought that Mean Girls was going to be a huge success because I thought it had intergenerational appeal. I thought there were young people now who would enjoy and be excited about Mean Girls as well as the older generation who would have been teenagers when the film first came out. And you know what? That might have been enough for Mean Girls to be successful if it weren't for another show that opened last year. Now, what I have heard offhand from a couple of different people is that the opening of the Devil Wears Prada musical at the Dominion Theater may have wounded the Mean Girls box office, and that it was around this time that the Mean Girls.
- [09:14]
Ben
Ben hadn't had a decent night's sleep in a month. So during one of his restless nights, he booked a package trip abroad on a Expedia. When he arrived at his beachside hotel, he discovered a miraculous bed slung between two trees and fell into the best sleep of his life. You were made to be rechargeable. We were made to package flights and hotels and hammocks for less. Expedia made to travel. Not all meals are created equal. For instance, breakfast had the spicy egg McMuffin for a limited time, and lunch does it McDonald's breakfast comes first.
- [10:02]
Mickey Jo
Ticket sales started to decline a little bit. It's a great time now to remind you that we don't have publicly available grosses in the West End. So a lot of what we talk about when we talk about UK box office sales is based on speculation and what we can tell from availability and discounts and deals and word of mouth about auditorium capacities and seating upgrades. But certainly Mean Girls seem to be doing very well throughout the summer after it opened. And it was around the same time that Devil Wears Prada was opening at the Dominion, that things started to turn a corner a little bit. And that could make a lot of sense. After all, Mean Girls was playing at the Savoy Theatre, a bigger theater than at Soho Place or the other Palace. And for an extended period of time, that's an awful lot of seats to fill. And in that kind of a space, with midweek performances, out of school holidays, with midweek matinees, you can't rely on young people, on young adults and teenagers, because they don't have the same kind of availability to travel into London. They also don't have the money to be buying tickets. You are relying on their parents and families. Was Mean Girls a little too pink for the whole family to be interested? Were you hoping to find mothers and daughters, or were you really hoping to find that generation who had grown up with the movie, who would enjoy it as a nostalgic throwback? Well, the problem is this. The Devil Wears Prada film also came out in the early 2000s, right. And so it would be a similar nostalgic throwback, except for the fact if you were, let's say, a woman in your 30s or a woman in your 40s and you were going to have have a movie night with friends, would you be more inclined to watch Mean Girls or the Devil Wears Prada? I think you would choose the Devil Wears Prada. If I was to pick a film to watch now, and I know I'm not a woman in my 30s, but I would choose the Devil Wears Prada because I think it's easier to enjoy now. It's a more grown up movie. I love the original Mean Girls movie, but it would still feel like I was having kind of like a throwback pajama party teen movie night. And that's one thing to do in the comfort of your own home. But if you're going out to a West End theater, I think you might make the slightly more grown up choice to go and see the Devil Wears Prada. That speaks more to, you know, where you are in your life when you're in your 30s, when you're in your 40s, than mean girls does. And ever since Mean Girls announced its closing in the West End, I sort of anticipated that Clueless may similarly run out of steam. Because if anything, and though the Trafalgar Theatre is smaller than the Savoy, I feel like Clueless has less of an intergenerational recognition than Mean Girls. I feel like Clueless hasn't been as well remembered for its iconic visuals. Sure, and we've seen that yellow plaid suit replicated. But I don't think that Clueless has permeated ongoing generations in the same way that Mean Girls had. And you see like Mean Girls themed products at Primark, I think that that brand has endured far more successfully than the Clueless brand. That being said, I do wonder if they enjoyed a little bump in ticket sales when Mean Girls closed in the West End, because you have to imagine that those two would have been competing with each other to a certain extent. Either that or providing people with some really great material for two show days on either end of the strand. You go see a yellow show, you go see a pink show, you have a great day. So to bring it all back to Clueless, I don't think that the film has the same kind of enduring and wide reaching appeal in terms of its demographic, in terms of being as well remembered as something like the Devil Wears Prada as, you know, burlesque, which is the shiny new thing as Moulin Rouge, certainly. And as we're always talking about in these state of the industry videos, there is still a cost of living crisis. People don't have the income to be able to afford to see multiple different shows. So they can't go and see every single one of these, these. And if you're dividing your target audience like that, you need to become the thing that they want to see the most. And so you're only really going to get the people who are still really crazy about Clueless. And I just don't know that that's that many people. It also didn't like the West End on Fire with its initial reviews. If you want to know what I thought of the show, you can go and check out my video review or listen to the podcast version. And I do feel as though some of my key disappointments in the show may have gone some of the way towards damaging the word of mouth. Because none of this would matter as much if people were leaving the theater saying, wow, that's fantastic. I need to go again. I need to tell five friends that is how a show survives. And there are brilliant and strange shows that defy marketing that have found success that way. Look at the other yellow show in town, Operation Mincemeat. That show is really weird to explain and yet people have told their friends for years now that it's just really good and they've seen all of the great five star reviews and they trust in that. With Clueless, in spite of some undeniably catchy songs and, you know, a decent production and really, really brilliant talent on stage, these fantastic young performers, something about the emotional heart of the story never really connected for me when I saw the show. And you have this hugely charismatic and charming female lead who spends the majority of the show trying to help other people in a way that is slightly naive with a slightly rose tinted perspective of the world. But then the narrative punishes her at the end for being short sighted when, you know, we're still pretty endeared to her other than one moment of acting out against her housekeeper. It lacks the emotional clarity of something like a mean girl story that has a really clear message of being a good person or a Legally Blonde story about not judging a book by its cover. It's unclear what Clueless is trying to tell us other than, you know, weren't the 90s fun? And they were, but they also very possibly weren't long enough ago to inspire nostalgia in the same way. Maybe in 10 years time, 20 years time, we'll be able to reflect on that decade from a slightly further distance. Now, I mentioned the very talented young cast. It's also a reality reality that they are all rising stars and relative newcomers. A lot of graduate performers in this show, certainly no big celebrity names which you wouldn't expect to need in something based on a movie. You know, it's a real indictment.
- [15:50]
Ben
The McDonald's snack wrap is back. You brought it back. Ranch snack wrap. Spicy snack wrap. You broke the Internet for a snack Snack wrap is back. Sasha hated sand the way it stuck to things for weeks. So when Maddy shared a surf trip on Expedia Trip Planner, he hesitated. Then he added a hotel with a cliffside pool to the plan and they both spent the week in the water. You were made to follow your whims. We were made to help find a place on the beach with a poor pool and a waterfall and a soaking tub and of course, a great shower. Expedia made to travel.
- [16:37]
Mickey Jo
On the West End theater industry Right now, if the show has to be a name and the cast have to be names as well, that's a very troubling concern. But it's also very possible that it's one more reason why the show is closing. So the only thing left to discuss is what's next? What's next for these brilliant performers? What's next next for leading stars Keelan McAuley and Emma Flynn? What's next for the show? What's next for the Trafalgar Theatre? Well, here is some speculation and some answers. First of all, as far as Clueless is concerned, they are going to be going on tour from, I believe, September 2026. The tour is going to commence at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley, which makes a lot of sense because that was Clueless's pre West End home. It's going to be heading back there before traveling around the country. It'll be very interesting to see how much of an audience it picks up along the way because I don't know that the issues that I described feel necessarily specific to London. I feel as though it may face some similar challenges regionally, but we'll have to wait and see. And you know, while I can contend that the brand isn't as strong as something like Mean Girls, it does have the benefit of not having been diluted all these years. If you've been a Clueless fan, there haven't been remakes and conventions and products and that many outlets for you to celebrate enjoying this film. So here, this musical is going to come along and you're going to be like, oh my gosh, yes, Clueless, Clueless. Hopefully that works for them on tour. I've literally just remembered the Cruel Intentions has also been on tour around the country at the same time. And I feel like that is a lot of a crossover of demographic, thematically, very different shows, very different movies, but came out at around the same time. And it wouldn't surprise me if they share a bit of an audience as well. And faced with the decision of staying local and going sequel intentions or traveling into London to go see Clueless, I feel like you might pick Cruel Intentions and Cruel Intentions Intentions also with their jukebox musical soundtrack really played up the 90s of it all. They called themselves cruel intentions, the 90s musical. Anyway, back to the future of Clueless. I am curious about whether they're going to try and make this work in the us. It has a big history in the us. There has been an Off Broadway production before. They would have to do a lot to try and shake the memories of that one. It starred Dove Cameron, it was quite high profile but it was not successful. And this one by all accounts seems to be a better version of the show, but not light years beyond. My bigger intrigue is what we're going to see all of these fantastic performers do next. In particular Keelan McCauley and Emma Flynn. And there is a tour of Legally Blonde going out soon and I said in my original Clueless review that Emma would be perfect as an Elle Woods. That is if this upcoming Legally Blonde tour decides that they want to cast an Elle woods who fits into the stereotypical Reese Witherspoon image. Because our last major production of Legally Blonde here in the UK broke through a lot lot of long standing barriers in terms of the way that they cast not only Elle with the fabulous Courtney Bowman, but the entire company. Really much to the satisfaction of many audience members. And Emma has played Elwoods before, but I see no reason why she can't do it again. Keelan, meanwhile, I think is a hugely charming and offbeat talent with a really interesting range. Having played this charming role but also having played JD and Heather's, I'm very intrigued to see what he does next. I dare say he's unlikely to find himself screaming in a high tenor range while somersaulting off of a table. So if you want to see him do that specifically glare, you have to go see Clueless before it closes on the 23rd of August. And what about the Trafalgar Theatre after Clueless closes? Well, I'm pretty sure I can tell you what the next tenant is going to be. Do you remember last week when it was announced that a new play written by Samuel D. Hunter would be opening in the West End from an unspecified date at an unnamed venue? Well, my theory at the time was that Clueless was about to announce closing, but because they hadn't yet, this new show couldn't very well come along and say we're opening this autumn at the Trafalgar Theatre because people would be like, what do you mean? Clueless is running through March 2026. A lot of Times when shows are kind of stepping on each other's feet, there has to be consideration of press releases and news they haven't announced yet. But this play wants to start building its profile, wants to get people aware that it's coming with Joe Locke and Sophie Melville and the other cast member, that it's going to be coming to the West End and that it's going to be on sale soon. They can't put it on sale because you can't do that without announcing dates and a theater. People would figure it out from the seating plan and also people would want to know where they're going with the tickets that they've bought. So I would speculate that we are going to hear an announcement very soon, maybe as early as the start of next week, that that play is going to be opening in perhaps the second week of September at the Trafalgar Theater. Clarkston. Was its name called Clarkston. But I believe that that is only going to be a limited run and it is not going to see out the end of the year. I think there will be another show coming into the Trafalgar Theater before the end of 2025, and this one, I think, is going to be a transfer from Broadway. No, it isn't. Beetlejuice, before you ask me, thinks about putting Beetlejuice in this comment section. Has to go and face a wall for 10 minutes and give yourselves a timeout. It is going to be something considerably more recent. I don't want to divulge any more information than that because I don't want to step on the show's announcement and release and interfere with the PR and marketing teams working very hard to bring about this news when the time is right. But I think people will be excited. I hope that people will be excited. It certainly is a show that has had a lot of success. Whether it will have the same kind of success here is a little bit harder to say. But I'm excited for it to open in London regardless. For now, that is everything I think there is to discuss about the closing of Clueless. Once again, my thoughts are with the company, the crew, everyone working at and beyond the Trafalgar Theatre. On this show. Certainly it was a very charming musical that brought joy to an awful lot of young fans. And that's a very special thing to be able to do regardless of how long you you run. And hopefully that's something that the cast will all be able to go on to do in other shows and that the show itself will go on to do on tour from 2026. In the meantime, there will be plenty more theatrical news to discuss over the coming days, so make sure you're subscribed right here on YouTube. Turn on notifications if you want to stay up to date with all of the latest West End and Broadway theatre news, or go follow me on podcast platforms. Thank you so much for listening to this. Make sure to share your own thoughts about Clueless the Musical in the comments section down below. And I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stable stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
- [23:09]
Ben
Sasha hated sand the way it stuck to things for weeks. So when Maddie shared a surf trip on Expedia Trip Planner, he hesitated. Then he added a hotel with a cliffside pool to the plan and they both spent the week you were made to follow your whims. We were made to help find a place on the beach with a pool and a waterfall and a soaking tub and of course, a great shower. Expedia made to travel in the summer.
- [23:40]
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- [24:11]
MultiCare
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- [24:20]
Mickey Jo
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