Review: HUMBUG - Santa's Christmas Dive Bar Experience (2025)

Santa has been propping up the bar in his favourite watering hole and is lacking in Christmas spirit. Can we save the holiday season and get him back on his sleigh, or has he hung up his boots for good? Our review of Humbug, the immersive Christmas dive bar.

Photo: Grant Walker

Temperatures are dropping, and it's getting dark at what feels like 3pm again, so that can only mean one thing: Christmas is fast approaching. With it comes the return of Humbug, the adults-only immersive Christmas dive bar experience, which previously took over Brick Lane's Truman Brewery and this year returns to its spiritual home of Waterloo, where it first debuted in 2023.

The experience, which this time around is at The Vaults just off Leake Street, combines live music, sing-alongs and cabaret with a cast of memorable characters to create a raucous and booze-fuelled evening out that's basically the adult equivalent of going to a Christmas grotto, but with cocktails, swearing and sacks full of innuendo.

This edition of Humbug is front-loaded with several immersive scenes for groups of up to 20 at a time. Starting in the Humbug Mail Room, guests are introduced to bumbling mailman Howard (Perry Meadowcroft/Craig Hamilton), who's getting increasingly worried after losing all of the letters due to be delivered to Santa after a few too many after-work cocktails. He's quick to swear in the group as honorary, seasonal Humbug Mail workers and soon tasks them with searching through all the sorting office's pigeonholes for any stray letters bound for the North Pole.

Photo: Grant Walker

With the search yielding little success, Howard directs guests out of the Mail Room through the 'Die Hard tunnel'. There's no explanation for its existence, and of course, nobody questions it, because if you're given the chance to act like John McClane, you say 'Yippee-ki-yay' and start crawling.

On the other side, guests come face to face with Daphne (Savannah Beckford/Heather Gourdie), a disgruntled waitress who has long since mentally clocked out of her job, inside the bar's office, which is doubling as Santa's dressing room for his open-ended residency at Humbug.

Daphne expresses some concern for Santa's well-being, sharing that he should have already been on his way back to the North Pole, and if he doesn't leave Humbug soon, Christmas might end up being cancelled. While Daphne has long dreamt of being a singer on Humbug's main stage, an embarrassing moment in her past ended with a pile of vomit on the stage, so she's convinced there's a Christmas curse hanging over her and has vowed to no longer perform.

Photo: Grant Walker

Johnny (Thomas Fabian Parrish/Joey Bradick), who enters the room at the end of Daphne's speech, has no such issue performing on stage. As the lead singer of Humbug's house band, he's slightly worried to hear that Santa hasn't arrived ahead of his final performance yet, but encourages us to holler and cheer later on when Santa takes the stage. With a strum of his guitar, the doors of a nondescript wardrobe swing open, and guests are ushered past rails of coats and jackets into an elaborately decorated hallway covered floor to ceiling in wrapping paper and bows.

While the Mail Room and Bar Office are both well decorated and detailed, the wrapping paper tunnel serves as guests' first introduction to the maximalist design on display throughout the venue. Every inch of Humbug's main space is covered in Christmas memorabilia, including VHS tapes, board games, trinkets and signs for the North Pole. References to classic Christmas films like Home Alone, The Grinch, Die Hard (which is 100% a Christmas film), and The Santa Clause are scattered throughout the space by the dozen, and basically every corner of the venue is crying out to be Instagrammed. If you so wished, you could fill an entire evening just admiring the venue's lovingly curated set dressing.

Photo: Grant Walker

The centrepiece of Humbug's main space – a gold streamer-lined main stage – sits at the far end of the venue and plays host to Johnny Whiskey and the Barflys throughout the evening, alongside duets from Howard and Daphne and solo performances from Santa, who is meant to be performing for the final time before heading back to the North Pole.

Throughout the 2-hour-long experience, several scenes tie into the story set up in the show's immersive rooms, including Howard's ongoing hunt for Santa's letters and Daphne's repeated refusal to perform on her own, but the main focus once the on-stage performances begin is Santa (Curtis Medley/Ryan Freebury) and their refusal to get into the Christmas spirit.

Those who have attended Humbug before will immediately notice that Santa has been reworked quite heavily for this 2025 run. Previous versions of the show portrayed Santa as a pint-loving East London geezer, too drunk to drive his sleigh and resigned to staying in Humbug purely because he couldn't stay away from the bar long enough to sober up. In this year's version of the show, he's a charismatic Mancunian who's seemingly got his life together but just can't face returning to the North Pole and delivering presents yet again.

Photo: Grant Walker

Alongside several modern Christmas classics from the likes of Ariana Grande and Mariah Carey performed throughout Humbug, there are also some deeper festive cuts on Humbug's setlist. Clarence Carter's 'Back Door Santa' turns more than a few heads once people clock the lyrics, and a brief rendition of 'All I Want For Christmas Is Booty', a song from John Goodman's opening monologue in a 2013 episode of Saturday Night Live, shows that no festive song is too obscure to include, as long as it's catchy.

In the second half of Humbug, an extended scene on stage featuring Santa wearing a bucket hat and red tracksuit, along with a gold snowflake chain, draws some of the evening's loudest cheers. DJ Pied Piper's 'Do You Really Like It?' and M-Beat's 'Incredible' both blast from the speakers while Daphne, who's sporting a green Team Australia cap, parodies the viral Olympian breakdancer with some wonderfully half-hearted dance moves.

While the live band (featuring Tomas Wolstenholme as Ginger Snap on bass and Josh Haberfield/Evie Joy Wright as Rudy on drums, alongside Johnny) put on a great show, on the night we attended, the room's acoustics made a lot of their hard work tough to hear clearly. The sound bounced off the venue's arched brick walls in every direction, creating a muddled mix that made distinguishing the vocals from the instruments nigh on impossible.

When The Barflys aren't performing live, and pre-recorded tracks are played, there was no such issue, which sadly results in the live performances - both musical numbers and dialogue scenes - often failing to hold the audience's attention. The accumulation of numerous group conversations also drowned out a good amount of what was happening on stage for all but those in the premium cabaret seats directly in front of the stage.

Photo: Grant Walker

Outside of the show's cast occasionally moving through the audience and a brief conga led by Howard and Daphne around the venue, the majority of Humbug's runtime is devoid of any audience interaction, besides a handful of the letters written to Santa earlier in the evening by guests being read out on stage. On top of this, one of the standout moments from earlier editions of Humbug – the group visits to Santa’s makeshift grotto hidden in the venue’s backrooms – no longer appears in the production, further reducing the opportunities for guests to interact with the show's cast.

While some performance elements have been scaled back for 2025, the food and drinks on offer at Humbug remain consistently strong and suitably festive. Cocktails include the bright green Grinch 3.0, a Festpresso Martini, and the Bah F*ckin' Humbug, which is made up of at least three different spirits and comes with a sparkler and candy cane on top. Food, which comes courtesy of Bang Bang Burger, includes a Chicken Humburger that's stuffed with Brussels sprout slaw and cranberry sauce on top of a fried chicken breast, alongside slightly less indulgent, but still great, beef and vegan options. Those feeling up to the challenge can also take on a side order of 20 pigs in blankets, with more traditional sides and desserts like stuffing balls and waffles also on offer.

Photo: Grant Walker

As a booze-fuelled evening of festive cheer and sing-alongs, Humbug is an ideal choice for those in search of a Christmas night out with friends or colleagues that's grown-up and leans into the adult humour. Anyone going into Humbug hoping for an experience that's as much an immersive show as it is a Christmas knees-up may leave disappointed, but you'd have to have a heart two sizes too small to stumble out of Humbug and not find yourself more in the Christmas spirit than when you went in.

★★★

Guide: London's Best Immersive Christmas Experiences (2025)

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Humbug runs at The Vaults near Waterloo Station until 31st December 2025. For more information and to book, visit feverup.com. Tickets start from £22.00.