Thank you for this thread! I thought I was alone thinking that the following were so incredibly overrated.
PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was literally PURE TORTURE except for the overall 15 minutes or so that the phantom is actually in the play. The rest was like being in detention and not being able to leave. It amazes me that this show still has the lines of people waiting to see it. You would think that word of mouth could kill it, but it goes on and on. Guess the people who love it speak louder

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HAIRSPRAY was so disappointing to me. I actually saw it twice on discounts, the first time was when it initially opened. I went back the second time about a year or so later thinking maybe it was just because I had the beginnings of pneumonia the first time I saw it; and possibly, it was me and the critics were right...they weren't. It still was a big disappointment.
SPAMALOT, although not really bad, wasn't memorable for me. Some of the jokes were just "too beaten to death, even for Monty Python jokes." There were some good things: Tim Curry, Sara Ramirez, but mostly it disappoints and doesn't deserve all of the accolades it gets. When I walk past the theatre and see all of the people on line waiting for SRO or cancelled tickets, I often wonder if they realize that a lot of them are going to be disappointed at all of the hype and lack of delivery of this award winning show.
Of course, just my opinion, but a lot of the shows that get panned or mixed reviews by the so called critics, I enjoy: LENNON; ALL SHOOK UP; MOVIN OUT; ROCKY HORROR; the list goes on. I usually find that with just a few exceptions, most of the critics don't love the shows I do. Then again, critiques are basically opinions anyway. Critics happen to get paid for writing theirs, but it doesn't make theirs right and the rest of ours wrong. I just wish people wouldn't put so much credence into what the critics say, and just use them as guidelines.