The Wedding Singer, twenty years later

It feels like the 2000s were a blur of highly commercial mid-size musicals that came and went with great rapidity, with only a few of them making a mark in general consciousness. Out of all of them circa that 2006 era, I've always felt like "The Wedding Singer" is the one that should have lasted longer as part of the zeitgeist, but it didn't wind up with quite the same legs that Legally Blonde had.

Maybe it's the heavier male to female casting ratio, plus the whole "your three lead characters are musicians who (hopefully) actually have to play onstage" that made it harder to cast. But the songs are great, the lyrics are really clever, and there's nothing especially problematic about it. (The scene and song where the two straight guys in the band are seemingly totally oblivious that their hangout is a gay bar is handled without any real cliches or homophobia.) It's too bad we didn't get an Alex Brightman Wedding Singer at Encores or something... he's the type of actor/singer/musician type the role of Robbie was made for. (In a few years, I'd recommend Gaten Matarazzo for the part too.) But out of Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin's three musicals, I'm always going to say that this one may be their least popular, but it's their best by far.

Our community theater just put this on a few weeks ago – it was a total delight. Fond memories of seeing this on Broadway back in 2006!

I was shocked how much I loved it when I saw it at a summer stock a few years back. I went into it really reluctantly

I remember seeing it for the first time on The Tonys that year with that absolute ear worm of a song. It's a show that never really got Its flowers on Broadway, but I'm glad it's had a healthy regional life.

It was a ton of fun. Didn't want to be anything other than that, something I miss nowadays.

Let Me Come Home is great, and I still think it’s one of the two worst songs in the show. That’s how overall solid I think that score is.

This is the thread where I learned I'm the same age as Kad and darquegk, I always assume the literate longtime posters I still enjoy reading have been around Broadway for a couple more decades lol.

Stephen Lynch big for me and my nerdy friends too, I shudder to think about how The Craig Machine would hold up today.

Judging from the score alone, this has an absolute banger of an opening number, but it kinda tapers off after that IMO.

Fun, safe, could make for a decent Encores revival.

Updated On: 3/29/26 at 08:54 PM

^ definitely a John Behlmann or Drew Gehling type!

It would almost have to be a star vehicle, since despite the show being "pretty-good-bordering-on-great" it isn't a name, and it's better than the somewhat disposable Adam Sandler movie it's based on. But then you need an actor who can act, sing, play guitar, do believable stand-up, and thread the needle of "adorkable" to "genuinely disturbingly unhinged." If he's too much of a sad sack and doesn't go absolutely feral during his binge-drinking/meltdown in Act 1, it doesn't work. Robbie Hart is not Pippin, and you can't just drop a heartthrob type in since the comedy is as central as the romance. (The ultimate Robbie Hart candidate is unfortunately too big to do a cult romcom revival on Broadway: Joe Keery.)

In my time as a producer, I was talking to a large company that had built a reputation developing and premiering cabaret/chamber sized versions of larger shows that often go unproduced. The two "big shows that feel small" I recommended looking at were The Full Monty and The Wedding Singer, both of which feel like they'd do better in a tiny cast, small band version.

Kad said: "Scarywarhol said: "This is the thread where I learned I'm the same age as Kad and darquegk, I always assume the literate longtime posters I still enjoy reading have been around Broadway fora couple more decades lol."

To be perfectly honest with you- I thought you had some years on me! But I guess we're from the generation that had to take computer and typing classes."

It was in my case a time when sensitive boys of theatrical interest might still be influenced by lunch hours in the library poring over Burns Mantle Best Plays volumes of the 20s to the 80s. I think I probably started posting at 14 trying to do an impression of what I thought people who wrote about theater sounded like, and I think those neurons are still firing when I log on here. I'm sure the right therapist could draw out something about why I still post here and keep that alive.

I didn't see the original production live but I have seen a bootleg and other live productions since.

I used to say it was a guilty pleasure but I don't think I have any guilt about it. It's a really good show - a funny script and one of the sneaky best scores of the 2000s. Songs that are complete earworms but also advancing the plot and character development.

I think it gets done a fair amount regionally and at colleges still but would probably be a more of a high school staple like Legally Blonde if it was a little more PG and a little easier to cast.

In an alternate universe, this is the eighties pop musical revival Aaron Tveit and Lea Michele are starring in, even though she’s much more right for it than he is.


Julia has to have a bit of the same energy Robbie does, where she’s cute and lovable but genuinely a LITTLE bit crazy in that Elaine Benes way. It’s not even a hard sing compared to Holly- you could probably cast an actress-who-sings and not suffer much for it.