The Recs’ Theatre Review of 2025
Editor Steve Coats-Dennis takes a Recs eye view on the shows that summed up the 2025 Theatre scene for us
It’s that time of year where it is customary to have a quick glance in the rearview mirror and see which theatre events of 2025 deserve one more hook or another ovation. Strap in as we review balconies, uncertain openings and unsurprising closures, Edinburgh precipices, icebergs and other disasters – 2025 was quite the ride.
Titaníque
A wonderfully silly start to the year was provided by Titaníque, the bonkers jukebox musical that had previously run off Broadway for three years. Docking in London’s cosy Criterion Theatre, the production centres on Celine Dion (an effervescent Lauren Drew) hijacking a Titanic museum tour, claiming to have survived the Titanic’s sinking. She narrates her version of what really happened to Jack and Rose through the medium of her back catalogue. Pop culture references vie with larger-than-life performances; this warm-hearted parody of the James Cameron movie was embraced by Brit theatregoers and even won Layton Williams an Olivier Award for his role as The Iceberg.
The show is due to make its Broadway debut in 2026 in the huge St James Theatre. Whether that is the right venue for such a souffle of a show remains to be seen. For a production that’s kept afloat with knowing nods and winks to the audience, you do have to question if scaling up the show to fit the 1700-plus-seat theatre might just be the factor to sink Titaníque there.
Punch by James Graham
British playwright of the moment, James Graham, brought us another of his gripping state-of-the-nation dramas with Punch. Based on a true-life incident, the work examines the painful and far-reaching effects that a single punch can bring.
Having opened the previous year for a limited run at the Nottingham Playhouse, Punch opened off West End at the Young Vic in March this year. Such has been the critical and commercial success that, in the latter half of 2025, this new play ran concurrently in the West End and on Broadway. Read The Recs’ ★★★★★ 5-star review of the play on Broadway HERE.
With the British Theatre Consortium’s report this week—Theatre Before and After Covid—revealing that while audience numbers are up, the volume of new plays has dropped within the UK theatre landscape. Hopefully the success of Punch will encourage producers to support more new writing.
Evita
Towards the end of 2024, it was announced that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita was to return to the London Palladium in summer 2025 for a 12-week limited run. Fresh from undoubted success with Sunset Blvd, the production was to be directed by the ever-polarising Jamie Lloyd. When tickets went on sale in January, the sales were very healthy despite no cast being announced. In late January, despite being heavily rumoured to be Jamie Lloyd’s Eva Perón, Ariana DeBose exited talks to lead up the production because *checks notes* of “scheduling issues”. Clearly, someone forgot to check their calendar. Oh what a circus…
And the cast stubbornly remained unannounced. For weeks! Despite the show being scheduled to begin previews in June, worryingly there was still no cast by March. And then finally, on March 14, it was announced that Rachel Zegler would make her highly anticipated West End debut in the show. And the doyennes of soi-disant “Theatre Twitter”, the hype-riding influencers and West End theatre forums lit up like a night of a thousand stars. A lightning rod for veneration and vilification, the 24-year-old Hollywood actress promised to be surprisingly good for keeping the production front and centre of every West End discussion.
She turned out to be spectacular in the role – as The Recs’ rave review HERE will attest. Jamie Lloyd produced a coup de théâtre with the Don’t Cry For Me Argentina balcony scene, as thousands of viral videos will attest, playing from the Palladium’s exterior balcony directly to the waiting public below in Argyll Street rather than the audience watching Eva’s rise on the big screen inside the auditorium. As well as endless free publicity, it made us all manipulated onlookers – and you can’t say fairer than that!
Not since Daniel Fish’s thrilling and controversy-courting reimagining of Oklahoma! in 2023 has a director taken a beloved and well-established musical and turned it into something so vital and thrilling. Will it go to Broadway? If Lord Lloyd Webber and Jamie Lloyd can find some common ground (allegedly over how to present that pivotal balcony scene in NYC), then this Evita truly will be high flying adored on Broadway.
The Edinburgh Fringe 2025
In July and August, the 78th Edinburgh Fringe tottered onto the scene like a boozy septuagenarian: spirited, familiar but also falling apart. In recent years, the terms ‘fringe’ and ‘crisis’ have celebrated a long-term, if not exactly healthy, relationship – and this year, the pair were inseparable. That the monotonous Mancunian charms of Oasis decided to descend upon the Scottish capital right in the middle of the world’s biggest arts festival was welcomed by no one other than the city’s gleeful hoteliers.
Truth be told, in terms of the programme itself, it wasn’t a vintage year. Of course there were highlights: beloved queer creatives Awkward Productions offered their best show yet with The Fit Prince, and Australian singing talent Arthur Hull made a memorable Fringe debut with his charming show Flop: The Best Songs from the Worst Musicals Ever Written, and Jade Franks thrilled us with Eat The Rich (but maybe not me mates).
What was striking, and from a reviewing perspective challenging, was the number of short runs within the schedule. Trying to find shows that were performing for the entirety of the festival proved increasingly difficult. This really speaks to the mounting expense of the Fringe, and short runs could well be the stepping stone to companies ruling out Edinburgh altogether.
The question hovers: why do Edinburgh when there are other much cheaper arts festivals? Few will expect to make a profit; many will be glad if they can break even. But the notion of Fringe being a springboard with the hope of some future life for a show, buoyed by glowing reviews, has always been a lure. But the current penurious state of reviewing has dented this appeal.
The Scotsman reducing its coverage is one thing, but there were practices beyond the pale. The spectre of review sites charging first-time performers for four- and five-star reviews, complete with pull quotes, ensnared the uninitiated yet again. Equally appalling were sites using AI to churn out “reviews” – a practice that truly belittled the efforts of performers who had spent time, effort and indeed money to bring their art to Edinburgh.
Not to gatekeep, but what constituted a review became increasingly amorphous. A single grab-quote sentence, then a plastic award and a picture with the act were all that the Fringe Society appeared to deem necessary for accreditation. Or an ‘influencer’ with a 30-second video sum-up? In its annual post-festival report, the society boasted of 718 reviewers having received official sanction. That the edfringe.com website uploaded 4,300 ‘reviews’ this year suggests some jaw-dropping maths. Namely, the average number of reviews by accredited professionals across the entire month of Fringe was less than 6 each. A colleague from a fellow site referred to these statistics as a “dark comedy” indeed.
There has to come a point where the quality of reviews has to cross a basic threshold – that the critiques are penned by humans evaluating the shows and giving honest feedback, not a couple of sentences of warm words for free tickets or AI reworking the press blurb. There are discussions with the Fringe Society about a Reviewers’ Code of Conduct – but there needs to be some urgency, as Fringe acts assume the provenance of accredited Fringe reviewers as legitimised by the Fringe when this has been sacrificed on the shiny distraction of seemingly greater numbers of available reviewers. In short, they are being sanctioned to be ripped off by those who should be protecting them.
What has been truly remarkable is how the NYC theatre scene has embraced The Recs.
For Fringe performers to expect that their work should be appraised by a human being, in a reasonably timely manner, in a review of some level of substance and critical appraisal, is not a big ask at all.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
In September of 2025, The Recs dipped its toe into reviewing in New York City. Our lead NYC reviewer, Randall David Cook, is an award-winning playwright whose work has been performed on BBC Radio and at New York Theatre Workshop as well as internationally.
What has been truly remarkable is how the NYC theatre scene has embraced The Recs with open arms and the most supportive welcome. From our first review – The Brothers Size at The Shed – press teams and PRs have responded to our enquiries with courtesy and enthusiasm. Rather than eyeing us warily as the new kid on the block, they have readily booked us into Off Broadway and Broadway shows. The New York scene seems far more attentive to the quality of your writing and the thought behind your critiques than number of followers on your socials, which everyone knows can be inflated by dubious methods. To be featured so quickly in Playbill‘s The Verdict articles, where they compile what the critics had to say on newly opened shows, and on show posters about Manhattan has been humbling.
What has been fascinating is our growing sense of what’s happening on each side of the Pond and those shows occasionally making the foray across it. Because of the costs of putting a show on Broadway, there certainly seems to be a growing sense of Let’s try out big musicals in the West End before taking the financial risk of a run on the Great White Way. 2026 promises to be another fascinating year both on and off Broadway – and we look forward to covering as much of it as we can!
When Star Casting Works...
In the current, far-from-clear climate where audiences can prove fickle, it’s not surprising that producers try to shore up interest in their various productions with a bit of star quality to boost the box office. And while a Hollywood name may sell tickets, the results on stage can be varied, to say the least.
Elektra, starring Brie Larson, was far from electrifying. Critic Carl Woodward called it “a production so underwhelming that it may deter first-time theatregoers for life.” Rami Malek was equally painful to endure in Oedipus at the Old Vic. Claire Allfree, writing in The Telegraph, spoke for many: “For Malek is almost entirely at sea with Oedipus, his curious tic-ridden delivery strangling almost every word at birth, his American drawl soaked in a lazy, grandiloquent insincerity.”
While these two were prime examples of when star casting goes wrong, you only have to look at Stratford in October 2025 to see the thrilling results of when casting doesn’t merely bring a ‘name’ but equal measures of talent and synergy with the role. The RSC casting Outlander star Sam Heughan in the title role as Macbeth in their brutush, urban production, set in a 90s gangland Glaswegian pub, gave audiences one of the best performances of the year. The Recs‘ Erin Muldoon wrote: “Sam Heughan as Macbeth can be summed up as dashingly psychotic. His debut at the RSC is nothing short of spectacular. His presence on stage is invigorating and terrifying at times.” You can read our ★★★★★ 5-star review HERE.
The Troubled Troubadour
It’s always thrilling when a new theatre opens. Though sometimes, commercial pressures build in a schedule that is unrealistic. Quod erat demonstrandum with the oh-so-brand-new, custom-built Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre. While various trains were chugging around and around and around the well-established sister venue of Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre in the revival of Starlight Express, no-one was answering me yes on the first preview of The Hunger Games: On Stage.
Given that The Hunger Games is a dizzying mix of dystopian oppression and brutal survival, the first night experience, on 20 October, certainly delivered with attendees parlaying the vibe of ‘chaotic’ and ‘poorly organised’ after queuing in the rain for a performance to start over an hour late and reportedly finishing nearer midnight. Even worse, for a purpose-built venue, there were multiple complaints about accessibility, particularly for wheelchair users. Oppression and survival indeed.
In the end, the show settled into the space – and indeed The Recs rated the spectacle highly – HERE. But was there a larger lesson to learn – other than don’t open before you are ready…or else people might think cynically that a chaotic opening would get more headlines than a soft launch having no issues?
With Capital Theatre, a 620-seat venue in the Westfield shopping centre opening in 2026 with a revival of the crowd-pleasing-but-pedestrian musical Dirty Dancing; the Troubadour Greenwich Peninsula Theatre, with its two as-yet unprogrammed 1,500-seat auditoria set to open its doors in autumn 2026; and the dubiously named British Airways Theatre, cleared for takeoff in 2027 as part of the historic Olympia exhibition site redevelopment, London is guaranteed to offer more theatre capacity in the upcoming months – though whether seats will be matched by cultural ambition remains to be seen.
And lastly, as we end the year, it behoves me to thank all our Recs readers. Thanks for your time reading our reviews, mostly agreeing though sometimes not, for visiting our socials and, the biggest thrill of all, for when you’ve read a review on our site, taken our recommendation and bought a ticket. We’ll be here next year, panning for theatrical gold and sifting out the fool’s gold. See you when the curtain rises on 2026.
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