Broadway Shrugs: ‘The Queen of Versailles’ Gets Nothing from Awards Voters

Kristin Chenoweth in “The Queen of Versailles” on Broadway, 2025 (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

by Chris Peterson

And the hits keep coming for The Queen of Versailles musical. 

Awards season is starting to wake up, and one of the more interesting developments so far is that The Queen of Versailles has now been completely shut out by both the Drama League Awards and the Outer Critics Circle Awards. It is, in fact, the only musical to receive not a single nomination from either group.

And at this point, that does not feel like some shocking injustice.

Because let’s be honest about what this show’s Broadway life has looked like. The reviews were rough. Then the show closed early. And now, as the season starts handing out nominations, even the groups that usually find a way to throw a struggling musical a bone have basically looked at Queen of Versailles and said, no thanks.

That is brutal, but it is also telling.

What makes this more fascinating is that this was not some tiny new musical that slipped in under the radar. This was a splashy project with a known title, a built-in hook, and Kristin Chenoweth front and center. That should have been enough to at least get it into the conversation somewhere. Awards groups love stars. They especially love stars doing heavy lifting in flawed shows. That is one of their favorite things, actually. They did it with Rob McClure and Chaplin and even Bonnie & Clyde with Laura Osnes.

So, when even that does not happen, it says a lot about how the industry felt about the show.

This was a musical that never seemed to figure out what it wanted to be. Was it satire? Was it camp? The problem was that it never seemed fully committed to any of those ideas. It just sort of sat there, expensively, hoping the title and the spectacle would do the work.

They did not.

Even more embarrassing, this season has not exactly been overflowing with unstoppable new musical masterpieces. This was not a year where the competition was impossibly stacked and Queen of Versailles got squeezed out by a dozen instant classics. There were opportunities. Other shows found their way in somewhere. The Queen of Versailles did not.

The story of The Queen of Versailles on Broadway is increasingly coming into focus: a high-profile musical that arrived with plenty of noise, failed to justify its hype, and is now facing the kind of across-the-board rejection Broadway delivers when a show simply doesn’t connect.

The hits keep coming because, frankly, the show keeps earning them.