Vanessa Williams Is Leaving The Devil Wears Prada — Can the West End’s Fastest-Selling Musical Survive Without Her?

The Devil Wears Prada has been the West End’s most dependable sales story, and now the reason for it is clearing her desk. When Vanessa Williams gives her final performance as Miranda Priestly at the Dominion Theatre, the production loses the one element that turned a familiar film into a ticket Londoners felt they had to buy — not the songs, not the frocks, but a star of genuine wattage inhabiting a role the culture already knew by heart.

That is the uncomfortable subtext of a farewell the listings pages are filing as routine housekeeping. A movie-to-stage adaptation lives or dies on one question: has it found a reason to exist beyond the affection audiences already carry for the screen version? On the evidence of its own reviews, this one mostly has not. What it found instead was Williams.

The commercial achievement is not in doubt. Adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s novel and the 2006 film, with a score by Elton John, lyrics by Shaina Taub and Mark Sonnenblick, a book by Kate Wetherhead and direction and choreography by Jerry Mitchell, the show became the fastest-selling production in the Dominion’s history after transferring from Theatre Royal Plymouth. The demand was real and it was immediate.

The verdicts were cooler. Critics met a high-energy, deliberately camp evening that came up thin on music you carry home — “few memorable songs,” remarkably, from a composer who has written so many — and design that, for a story about the tyranny of taste, somehow failed to scream haute couture. The book hands Andy more agency than the film allowed her, a real improvement, then loses its nerve in the detail and races through the iconic beats the audience came to see. Matt Henry, an actor of real stature as Nigel, was judged criminally underused; his single solo is the kind of moment the rest of the evening keeps promising and withholding.

Which leaves Williams doing the structural work. Her Miranda is a more frankly theatrical villain than Meryl Streep‘s study in weaponised, icy calm — warmer, funnier, less frightening, and precisely pitched to a house the size of the Dominion. It is a performance selling a show rather than a show showcasing a performance, and there is no shame in that; much of the West End runs on exactly this exchange. But it does mean the production is about to run an experiment it would plainly rather not.

Williams plays Miranda for the last time on 19 September 2026; Henry follows on 17 October. Their successors have not been named. The booking period, meanwhile, stretches to 6 February 2027 — months of performances scheduled to run on well past the departure of the two names that made the show a phenomenon. Williams has anchored the part since the Dominion opening in December 2024, and the production’s opening-night gala raised more than £750,000 for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. The goodwill, in other words, is banked. The test is what comes next.

The question the box office has been allowed to postpone arrives with her replacement: is this the Devil Wears Prada that audiences want, or was it always Vanessa Williams? A record-breaking run is a glorious thing to inherit. It is a much harder thing to hold once the person who set the record has taken her final bow.

Tags: The Devil Wears Prada, Matt Henry, stage adaptations, Vanessa Williams, West End musicals