Did Kristin Chenoweth’s Charlie Kirk Comments Really Cause the Closing of The Queen of Versailles?

Photo: Matthew Murphy

by Chris Peterson

Every once in a while a Broadway story comes along that feels like it contains more than the press releases and ticket grosses can capture. The Queen of Versailles closing early is one of those stories.

And I can’t help circling back to something I’ve written about before, something I still think matters, even if people would prefer to pretend it didn’t.

A few months ago, I asked a simple question in an open letter to Kristin Chenoweth: what exactly was the common ground she found with Charlie Kirk.

I wrote at the time,

“Kristin, you do not owe the world perfection. But you do owe us clarity. Tell us what you meant. Tell us what you agreed with. Because leaving it vague only leaves us guessing, and in a community built on honesty, vulnerability, and truth, guessing is not enough.”

I wasn’t being coy or dramatic. I genuinely wondered. I still do. But the answer never came, and the silence took on a life of its own.

Now that her Broadway show has announced its premature closing date(Jan 4th), the conversation feels different. Not louder, but more complicated.

And in moments like this, I find myself trying to pull apart the threads honestly, without pretending social media exists in a vacuum or that audiences are somehow immune to feeling betrayed by the people whose work they love.

Let me be incredibly clear right off the top. I don’t think Kristin’s comments about Charlie Kirk were one of the primary reasons The Queen of Versailles is closing. Broadway is an expensive, unforgiving place right now.

I wrote about this last week. A musical with a massive budget, mixed reviews, and unclear word of mouth can disappear faster than anyone wants to admit. The math doesn’t lie. The show faced challenges long before anyone was arguing about her Instagram post.

But I also think it’s naïve to pretend the controversy didn’t play any role at all. Broadway isn’t insulated from the world. Not anymore. And artists aren’t just artists. They’re brands, they’re public figures, they’re symbols, and sometimes, whether they want to be or not, they’re representatives of the communities that lift them up.

Kristin has long been beloved by queer audiences. Generations of them. Her voice, her humor, her heart, her absolute sincerity about allyship. So when she publicly mourned a figure like Charlie Kirk, a man whose rhetoric directly targeted the people who make up a huge portion of her fanbase, it landed with a thud that many of us felt in our stomachs.

I wrote then that something had shifted. You could feel it. Not outrage exactly, but confusion. Disappointment. A sense of emotional whiplash. The kind of reaction that can sit quietly in people’s chests for a long time.

And that’s where I think this show’s closing intersects with that moment. Not as a cause. But as part of the overall social media environment surrounding Chenoweth at a time when the show desperately needed unanimity, excitement, and the kind of organic “you have to see this” push that Broadway lives and dies on.

The Queen of Versailles wasn’t a disaster. It wasn’t a triumph either. It lived in that dangerous middle space where audiences weren’t rushing to get tickets, but they weren’t fleeing either. And in that space, all it takes is one more crack for the whole structure to wobble.

The conversation around Kristin became that crack. People didn’t boycott her. They didn’t riot. They didn’t stage mass protests. What they did was far quieter. They hesitated. They rolled their eyes. They said things like “I’ll catch it later” or “I’m not sure how I feel about her right now.” And those tiny soft stops, repeated thousands of times, can kill a show faster than any review.

That’s the part of this I keep coming back to. Not blame. Just the reality of how fragile trust is in the arts. The way it can evaporate with one post. The way a performer’s public choices follow them into the theatre whether they want them to or not. Broadway is built on the idea of shared experience and mutual investment. When artists forget that, even briefly, the consequences echo louder than expected.

So no, Kristin’s comments didn’t close her show. But they did shape the conversation around her at a time when the show needed every possible bit of goodwill. And pretending otherwise feels dishonest.

I’m writing this not to scold but to observe something important about the theatre community, something that has only grown truer in the age of nonstop discourse. Reputation is not just an accessory anymore. It’s part of the product.