DATING FOR A CONFUSED AGE
I have written before of the particular glee I feel when a brand-new and original show emerges , not from anxious corporate calculations but from young and gifted friends who lark about with ideas and then putting in the grunt-work to make something real: the Goes Wrong lot, the Operation Mincemeat group, lately Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder. And at the Broadway peak of this stand Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the friends who invented SIX: smart and sharp and mocking and – pleasingly – a bit heartless.
Now they present a new show, with more personal heart and artfullly larded with meta-theatre, as the protagonists Oliver and Nancy (pseudonymously naming themselves after Lionel Bart’s old banger) explain that they have been commissioned to write “a big fancy musical” and have to work out a story. Which, of course, is pretty much what happened to Marlow and Moss. In the show these real-but-fictional writers are played with brilliant energy by Jo Foster and Leesa Tulley. They’re epresented as Marlow ‘n Moss pretty much are: university friends, she a young woman and he (ok, ok, ‘they’) male ,gay self-defined as non-binary.
Together they realize that the story they need to tell is their own, wanderers in the modern forest of dating who encounter and are both disappointed in men (there’s a great MEN ARE TRASH number). They’re hoping for love but in the process realize that actually the platonic friendship between them was there all the time, important and glorious.
Comradeship between single women in their thirties and gay men has been around in romcom land forever; as Bridget Jones observed, both being resignedly used to disappointing their parents . But rarely has the gay-best-friend relationship been more determinedly, and indeed seriously, examined than here. It is of its time, in a rather good way.
Shouldn’t have said seriously, might have put you off. It need not. This is a riot, Oliver in bare legs and a short red kilt (“It’s not a skirt!”) and Nancy in likeable grungy big-shirt and sweats, well aware of their various absurdities. They are hanging out in his flat, in which a 13-strong ensemble and swing gamely represent most of the furnishings, lamps, bathroom and houseplants, capering around as necessary and constantly repurposed. First they are disco denizens of the dating world, as she mourns her ex , an older man in finance, and he takes every delay or cancellation of an online meet-up as his personal failure even if it really is appendicities. THen in in a wonderful number they watch FRIENDS (they’re millennials who grew up on it) and get overwhelmed by a crowd of clambering, dancing Rachels and Rosses in the “I got off the plane” climax. So the pair curse all Friends, di-Caprio-Winslet and other screen lovers, for being “so retro, so hetero”“But so f—-ing good!”. Schlock romance reinforces their own sense of failure, as it always has from time to time in all our lives.
That’s fabulous: and so is a glorious sequence in a brunch cafe where all the patrons are hunched, texting “Hang soon?” and vainly hoping for replies, until Noah Thomas as Artie, representative of their only sane and happily coupled friend, shouts at the pathetic lone brunchers to just text “C U Never!”at the absent swains, and leads them storming into a defiant tap-dance routine.
On it goes, cleverly pastiching several musical-theatre styles . There’s a less successful online-dating number, though the staging, under Lucy Moss’ direction with Ellen Kane’s as choreographer and co-director , is always wittily inventive. And there is sweet genius in the profile-planning lyric “a picture of me working out to show me at my best / a picture of me laughing, so they don’t know I’m depressed”.
Foster and Tulley are both tremendous stage personalities, he camply exuberant, she more openly vulnerable. Sometimes there are moments of real depth of feeling – notably in Nancy’s heartfelt number about her ex – “I would abandon it all, go when you call”, but wisely that moment is skewered instantly by Oliver’s thoughtful: “I don’t buy it. It’s just not possible to feel that much about somone who has a LinkedIn profile”.
But if Nancy is sometims taken seriously in her yearning, his (theirs, if you must) as a queer nonbinary seeker is taken even more so, with an extraordinary big number late on where he compares himself to a disco ball: nobody wants to see the broken bits of glass as long as it goes on sparkling for the rest of the room to enjoy.
And that’s the seriousness of it, vulerable humanity shimmering beyond the self-indulgence of a date-crazed generation. And that is what earns it as many hoots and cheers at the curtain as SIX ever had. It’s a step onward for Marlow and Moss. I cannot wait for their next adventure.
nimaxtheatres.com to 13. Feb
Rating. 4
theatreCat 