u/thomaspryor

I found 7 raves, 3 positive, and 1 negative. An 84 makes it the 4th highest scoring show off-Broadway right now.

Audiences are at an A- (across Show Score and Mezzanine).

https://broadwayscorecard.com/show/delirium-off-broadway

David Walters at Front Row Center declared "Everything about this production is wonderful and it will have you standing and cheering come curtain call."

So, despite a packed schedule, we added a fourth show to our three-show week and will check this one out in two weeks 😵‍💫

It opened at Orpheum Theatre, and I found 11 reviews: 2 raves, 3 positive, 4 mixed, 2 negative. Based on my experience of it in the earlier run, split reactions like this checks out :)

Audiences are at a B- (across Show Score, Theatr, Mezzanine, and Reddit).

Do you think this split of reviews is fair?

https://broadwayscorecard.com/show/slam-frank-off-broadway

I launched WestEndScorecard a few weeks back, and this is my first review roundup post for a London show. And it's a doozy! Trainspotting the Musical opened Tuesday with 36/100 critic score across 19 reviews. 15 negative, 2 mixed, 1 positive, and one lone rave. Even the NY Times crossed the pond to hand it a big pan.

Audiences aren't any kinder at a C+ grade.

The interesting part: nearly every review, including the pans, praised Lewis Kidd's Renton. Critics blamed the format, not the cast. The Evening Standard said the show doesn't even seem to want to be a musical.

London is on a great run otherwise. Cyrano de Bergerac is at 91, Pride at 85, The Guilty at 82, and the To Kill a Mockingbird return is at 79.

We are off to the UK in two weeks before Fringe, and ofc this is at the bottom of our list. But I think that was the case even before the reviews came out.

Even if it was a hit in London, I doubt it'd come over, since I think the film was much more niche/cult in the US?

westendscorecard.com/show/trainspotting-the-musical-west-end

Hi all, Tom here. I launched WestEndScorecard a few weeks back, and this is my first review roundup post. And it's a doozy!

Trainspotting the Musical opened Tuesday at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. 36/100 across 19 reviews. 15 negative, 2 mixed, 1 positive, and one lone rave (The Upcoming gave it a 91). Audiences aren't much kinder at a C+ grade.

The interesting part: nearly every review, including the pans, praised Lewis Kidd's Renton. Critics blamed the format, not the cast. The Evening Standard said the show doesn't even seem to want to be a musical.

Anyone catch it recently? We're coming over from NYC in two weeks before Fringe, and ofc this is at the bottom of our list. But I think that was the case even before the reviews came out.

westendscorecard.com/show/trainspotting-the-musical-west-end

I’d seen a few viral YouTube videos of past Jimmys, so I thought I knew what to expect: extreme eagerness and earnestness. I was still completely unprepared for the levels of both! 

More importantly, these kids were incredible.

Over half the 100+ kids could have been in adult roles on Broadway and I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. There’s more to a career on Broadway than just one solo on stage, but boy am I confident in the talent pipeline. 

Some of my friends are mocking me for having such an incredible time lol but I don’t care I had a blast and cried multiple times. 

I didn’t grow up in the US so I only knew of Theater Kid energy from pop culture. Experiencing it up close was something else. As a rural Australian country town teen, I would never have believed this level of intensity and opportunity and talent existed. It’s so America. 

I do worry it’s a lot to put onto kids at that age. So much pressure and professionalism expected. I hope they still get to be kids?? Though at the afterparty they still seemed very capable of being kids :) 

I also wonder how much better younger performers are at these type of performances now that they have so much access to content and various song/role interpretations online these days? 

Broadway is between openings ahead of the Tonys, but Off-Broadway has been putting up some of the strongest reviews I've seen in a while:

>Jerome: 62
And Then The Rodeo Burned Down: 82
Small: 76
Indian Princesses: 78
Animal Wisdom: 75

And before that was: Emporium (67), The Maids (68), New Born (71), The People Versus Lenny Bruce (51).

These shows are all getting good coverage from critics too, with most getting 8 reviews, and some up to 13 each. Grateful to all those outlets still covering this important ecosystem!

I've been adding every Off-Broadway show I can to Broadway Scorecard:
https://broadwayscorecard.com/off-broadway
Shout out if I'm missing any reviewed shows (that have 3+ critic reviews).

We're so lucky to have so much good theater in NYC even when Broadway itself is slow. Many of these shows go undiscovered.

We've got Jerome tickets next week (still curious and want to support queer art) and I'm eyeing And Then The Rodeo Burned Down. Any others that are must-sees?

The Tonys are Sunday and I went a little overboard: pulled every "who will win" prediction I could find, category by category, to see where critics agree and where they're all over the place.

16 outlets, 17 predictions (the NYT ran two, and its critic and its reporter don't even agree): NYT (Helen Shaw and Michael Paulson), Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vanity Fair, Time Out, Entertainment Weekly, Elle (who knew??), Slant, TheaterMania, New York Theatre Guide, The New York Sun, Culture Sauce, City Guide NY, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune. Heads up before anyone counts: not every outlet calls every category, so the totals shift around.

Best Musical is the one nobody can call: a flat 7–7 tie between The Lost Boys and Schmigadoon!, plus one stray vote for Two Strangers. Even the NYT split it perfectly: Shaw has the vampires, Paulson has the throwback.

The other races where critics actually disagree:

• Best Revival of a Musical: Ragtime 10, Cats: The Jellicle Ball 5
• Best Actor in a Play: John Lithgow 10, Nathan Lane 6
• Best Direction of a Musical: Cats 7, Ragtime 3

And then, for contrast, four categories where literally nobody dissented:

• Best Revival of a Play: Death of a Salesman (15/15)
• Best Actor in a Musical: Joshua Henry, Ragtime (15/15)
• Best Actress in a Play: Lesley Manville, Oedipus (15/15)
• Best Featured Actress in a Play: Laurie Metcalf, Death of a Salesman (11/11)

Everything else leans hard one way: Liberation takes Best Play (12 of 15), and Caissie Levy, André De Shields, Shoshana Bean, and Alden Ehrenreich are all clear favorites.

Full breakdown with every outlet's individual pick: https://broadwayscorecard.com/tony-awards/predictions/2025-2026

Note: some authors don't make a "will win" call in every category, or only talk about "should win." This is limited to the prediction-type claims only. If I’m missing any outlet predictions please let me know!

It’s almost time. Thank goodness. This has been a fun but exhausting season to watch! 

– Tom

For the Tonys I wanted to make something more interesting than "guess the winners, hope you're right".

So I built a ‘Beat The Critics’ game/competition: submit your Tony picks and see how you stack up against three theater critics (Naveen Kumar, Dan Rubins, and Matthew Wexler).

Beat any one of the three and you're entered to win a $200 ticket voucher (courtesy of TodayTix). You also get a shareable scorecard of your picks at the end.

I've never run a competition before, but I figured why not!

• Dan is a theater critic for Slant Magazine and TheaterMania

and host of The Present Stage podcast

• Naveen is the former theater critic for The Washington Post, and his work appears in outlets including the NYT and Variety.

We’ll reveal their picks vs yours the morning after, and if you beat at least one of them, you might win the $200 TodayTix voucher. Drawn Jun 8.

I've seen their picks, and I do think they're beatable =)

I try to do a Tonys bracket with my friends at our watch party, but most of them have no idea about the Tonys so it's always just me and my partner competing against each other lol

Also, this year, we're going to the Tonys (fulfilling a lifelong dream!!!) so this is me getting the competition in before the night since I'll miss our watch party!

Note: This is free, just for fun, no one is making any money off it. Just something made for fellow theater geeks. Shout out any issues in the comments!

https://broadwayscorecard.com/beat-the-critics

This culturally crucial show was missing from broadwayscorecard and my friends rightfully called me out. Now that it's up, I'm pleasantly surprised by these reviews (80/100 from 7 critics) and we just booked our own tickets!

The Audience Grade is A+, which means this show is attracting exactly the right crowd.

I'm not expecting excellence, but I expect to have fun.

After Schmiggy, Titanique, Luigi, what's another spoof musical to add to this year's spoofapalooza. I doubt this one will transfer to broadway and steal a Tony nom next year. But hey, that's what we all thought about Titanique!

Because I'm nerd I built a custom model to predict this year's Tony winning shows based on underlying signals from broadwayscorecard, so it’s not just betting markets or pundits: 

• Critic Scores
• Audience Grades
• Award Scores (a new score I added: noms and wins across the precursor awards plus the Tony noms, weighted by ceremony and category importance)
• Specific precursor awards that generally correlate with winners.

I based the model on the last 11 years of winners across the four big show categories, with each category using its own recipe for maximal accuracy. 91% hit rate on the historical set: 39 winners correct, 4 wrong, including Outsiders over Suffs (I'm still bitter about that one, Suffs was robbed!). The other three misses are on Play Revival which is notoriously hard to predict (except this year?!).

Best New Musical: Schmig 59%; Two Strangers 25%; Lost Boys 15%

Best Musical Revival: Ragtime 71%, CATS 27%

Best New Play: Liberation 79%, Balusters 17%, Giant 3%

Best Play Revival: Death: 76%, Becky Shaw 10%

I’ll update the page daily as new data comes in. Shout out if you have any ideas for how to improve the accuracy even further. And just feel free to tell me how wrong these are lol

To be clear: these are NOT my personal predictions, just a statistically derived data point to try to see what we might otherwise miss in all our speculations. 

I’m personally still rooting for Two Strangers on Musical, and Cats on Revival. They both still have a 1 in 4 chance! 🤞

Constantly checking who's predicted to win each Tony, hoping to find some data point that says your fave is still in with a chance? Yup, me too. So I built a page with all the data I could find for every Tony race:

* Kalshi’s predictions
* Gold Derby’s predictions
* Polymarket’s predictions (all updated hourly)
* Precursor awards like Drama Desk, OCC, and Drama League
* Critic Scores
* Audience Grades 
* Award Scores (new score I added. It tracks noms and wins across the precursor awards plus the Tony noms, weighted by ceremony and category importance)
* Press picks: NYTimes, Variety, and Deadline picks for who should win (I’ll add more as they come in, let me know if I missed any)

https://broadwayscorecard.com/tony-awards/nominees Anything you'd like to see in here that I missed?

In two days I should have custom predictions trained on the last 11 seasons of Tony winners + all this data. That’s been fun to work on, and may also be controversial haha.

A few of the matchups are genuinely close this year. Curious what y'all find from the data with it all in one place. Though there is now a consensus winner (>70% across all markets) in 16 of the 24 categories.

I also added each performer’s Tony history next to their names, since I find that stuff interesting.

(Sorry I've not launched much for a while. The wild influx of show openings before the Tony window closed took it out of me, so I needed a few weeks off. And to focus on my real job lol)

Please let me know if there's any gaps or bugs or requests for what to add to the hub,
Tom

Scripts in hand, music stands, all of that. And then Michael Urie just... wasn't doing it that way. He played Felix like it was opening night of a full production. I forgot it was a reading too!

Billy Eichner was perfectly cast. The anger, the talkiness, the exhaustion of being right and being ignored.

And Jeff Hiller was a hoot. Limited stage time and he found every laugh and every soft beat.

Ben Stiller also nailed the straight-brother role, as much as was possible.

Incredibly moving. Certainly didactic and preachy. Larry Kramer was not interested in subtle. But that’s what was needed then.

And still is now, really. I'm not sure we've gotten any better at handling crises like this.

I felt so lucky to have been there for this, and to get a glimpse into how powerful and raw this must have been when it first came out.

4 raves, 11 positive, 7 mixed, 2 negative.

Better than I expected, honestly! Though I know many in this sub believed it deserved even higher.

Hot take: if this show had landed Act II properly, it would have been a lock for the Tony.

Instead we have a cluster of shows that most critics thought were good, but no standout.