‘The Queen of Versailles’ Bombed on Broadway. What Went Wrong?

The show reunited Kristin Chenoweth and Stephen Schwartz for the first time since “Wicked.” It wasn’t enough to counter poor word of mouth and other challenges.

“The Queen of Versailles,” the biggest-budget production to open on Broadway this fall and the only large-scale new musical, aspired to be a cautionary tale about consumption and greed. Instead, it wound up as a cautionary tale about Broadway.

The show, based on a 2012 documentary about a couple seeking to build America’s largest private home, was unable to hang on even through the normally lucrative holiday stretch, and closed last weekend after a disastrously short run, costing investors millions of dollars, leaving more than 150 people unemployed and adding to a mound of evidence that this is a season of struggle for original musicals.

“Obviously, it’s extremely disappointing,” the show’s composer and lyricist, Stephen Schwartz, whose other works include “Wicked,” “Godspell” and “Pippin,” said in an interview.

At the curtain call on Sunday following the final performance, several cast members were in tears as the audience, which included Jackie Siegel, the woman whose life was depicted onstage, rose to its feet. Kristin Chenoweth, the popular “Wicked” alumna starring as Siegel in the musical, told the crowd she was grateful for the show. “We took a big swing, and we are so proud of where we landed.” But, she added, “This will be a very, very hard one to say goodbye to.”

A Changing Broadway

The costs of producing and running shows on Broadway have been rising, increasing the pressure on producers of struggling shows to stem their losses by closing quickly.

Securities and Exchange Commission filings by “The Queen of Versailles” illustrate the challenge: In the spring of 2023 the producers submitted a document indicating they expected the show to cost between $14 million and $18 million; by the fall of 2024 they had sent in another filing saying they would need up to $22.5 million. And that doesn’t include any loans they later took out to keep it afloat once the run began.

Another factor: Word of mouth sets in fast now. Fans and influencers attend early previews of Broadway shows, while the material is still being reworked, and post their reactions on social media, chat boards and audience reaction sites. Those early reactions, in this case, were poor.

“Online commentary has an impact on word of mouth, and that happens so much sooner now,” Jay Krottinger, a co-producer, said.

Tone and Timing

The musical seemed to have a lot going for it. To start with, it reunited Chenoweth, one of Broadway’s biggest stars, with Schwartz, one of its most successful songwriters, for the first time since they worked together on “Wicked,” which is one of Broadway’s biggest hits. The show was directed by Michael Arden, an innovative theater artist who in June won a Tony Award — his second — for directing last season’s best new musical, “Maybe Happy Ending.” It has a book by Lindsey Ferrentino, and also starred F. Murray Abraham.

But critics and audiences felt the show had tonal challenges. Was it celebrating or condemning Siegel, a onetime pageant winner with ostentatious taste and a complicated family life? She was the main character, and played by the charismatic Chenoweth, but many found her unsympathetic, even as her family weathered the financial crisis and the loss of a child to a drug overdose. “The fatal flaw is that the audience members did not like Jackie Siegel because they saw her as a character who created all these self-inflicted wounds,” said Ryan Jude Tanner, who is Krottinger’s husband and producing partner, “so there was no way for them to stand in solidarity with her.”

Siegel was an enthusiastic supporter of the musical and Chenoweth’s performance. She was also an investor in the production, which led to a suspicion by some that she affected how the story was told — a claim that Schwartz denies. Siegel had no input, Schwartz said, and he found it “very upsetting to have the authors’ integrity questioned.”

“We wanted to examine the cost to a person and a society who value money and fame and acquisitiveness above all else, and we think it’s an important and timely subject,” he said. “If people saw the show and thought, ‘Well, they just didn’t do it well,’ fair enough. But this thought that we were somehow trying to celebrate or glorify billionaires is like saying ‘Sweeney Todd’ is glorifying cannibalism — it’s a complete misunderstanding of what we were attempting.”

One of the show’s challenges seemed to be context. The musical is about high-flying Floridians with a taste for grandeur, which reminded some of President Trump and his aesthetic — the Siegels, who have ties to Trump, modeled their house on Versailles, and Trump’s aesthetic has been compared to that of the gilded French palace. Shortly after the musical began previews, Trump tore down the White House’s East Wing to make way for an opulent ballroom; the musical has a joke about the construction of the Siegels’s east wing.

The show’s perceived political challenges were exacerbated after the murder of Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, in September; Chenoweth, who is both a progressive activist and a proud Christian, wrote on social media: “I’m. So. Upset. Didn’t always agree but appreciated some perspectives.” That comment alienated some of her fans because of Kirk’s right-wing politics. Chenoweth, a longtime supporter of gay rights and Democratic candidates, declined a request for an interview for this article. It’s unclear whether her comment actually affected ticket sales, but it was a distraction.

“We were living in a world where a comment on social media is met with unflinching hostility,” said a co-producer, Jack Lane. “We were living in a world where canceling people and projects became a daily sport.”

Quality Concerns

And then there was the more basic question — is the show any good? — that too many people answered in the negative.

A pre-Broadway engagement at Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston in 2024 offered reasons for optimism — there was audience interest — but it was not an unmitigated smash. The Boston Globe review, by Terry Byrne, praised Chenoweth, but had a headline calling the show a “mixed bag” and saying “the musical’s high notes soared, but there’s still some work to do.” In The New York Times, the critic Laura Collins-Hughes called the Boston run “surprising and frequently excellent” but also warned that, in the second act, “the tone flails.”

There were concerns that could be addressed — the show was too long, so it was trimmed, and the creative team made a number of other changes — but some challenges proved fundamental. Broadway previews began Oct. 8, and the headwinds were immediately apparent: Audience members praised Chenoweth and other cast members, but a substantial percentage of those who posted reactions found fault with the book (a muddled message), the score (a lack of bangers), the direction or even the subject.

By the time the show opened on Nov. 9, it was already facing underwhelming advance sales, and the new round of reviews didn’t help. Though Collins-Hughes was positive — declaring it a critic’s pick in The Times, and calling it “smart and sparkling” — most of the others were mixed or negative (“overdone and undercooked,” declared The Washington Post, while Entertainment Weekly included the show on a “3 worst Broadway shows of 2025” list), and whether they shaped or simply reflected public sentiment, the show never rebounded.

“What’s heartbreaking is when critique gives way to click-bait cruelty, and complexity is flattened by the speed and force of collective provocative judgment,” Arden, the show’s director, wrote on Instagram on Sunday. “Real people and real labor are lost in the noise.”

The show had been sold out during its first four previews, but the number of empty seats kept rising, and by the week ending Dec. 7, 26 percent of seats were unsold. Also, the average ticket price was falling, and weekly box office grosses, which had only crossed the $1 million threshold twice, dropped below $700,000.

A Truncated Run

On Nov. 24, just two weeks after opening, the show’s general partners — Bill Damaschke, Seaview and Chenoweth — announced that it would close on Jan. 4. And, although sometimes a closing announcement can spur sales to those who don’t want to miss a show, that did not happen; instead, sales continued to sag, and two weeks after that first announcement, the producers moved the closing date up to Dec. 21, a de facto acknowledgment that even over the Christmas holiday period, which is Broadway’s busiest time of year, not enough people were willing to buy tickets.

In the end, the show made it just six weeks past its opening; it had 32 preview performances and 41 regular performances.

As it closed, Andrew Kober, a member of the ensemble, mused online about the difficulty of making it on Broadway even with an experienced team. “From what I can tell, you don’t make 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 Broadway musicals, and then you know how to do it,” he said on Instagram. “Your best guess gets a little bit better over time. That’s all it is. But you’re still guessing.”

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