ajhlovestheatre

[TITLE OF SHOW]

Music and Lyrics by Jeff Bowen

Book by Hunter Bell

Directed by Christopher D Clegg

Southwark Playhouse, Borough – London, until 30 November 2024

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/title-of-show/

With its self-prescribed requirements of just four chairs, a quartet of performers and one keyboard, this show must feel like catnip for economically minded producers, but in practise [title of show] still feels like an odd choice for a revival. For starters, it really is for the musical theatre obsessives: a knowledge encompassing the smallest minutiae of the Broadway scene and an unslakable interest in the process of making a show are definite advantages when approaching this material. 

Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell’s 2006 Off-Broadway hit about a pair of creatives (named Jeff and Hunter, with Bowen and Bell themselves assuming these roles in the original production) devising a new musical from the ground up, was received less enthusiastically on the Great White Way a year later, but it’s stuffed with Easter Eggs to delight the most ardent and knowledgeable of MT fanatics. If you don’t know your Stephen Schwartz from your Stephen Sondheim, you’ll have to work harder to have a good time. Actually, this ninety minute meta-musical is even more niche than that, name-checking names of jobbing Broadway actors (“did you hear that Mary Stout got hit by a hot dog cart?”) and constructing a whole number out of the titles of obscure Broadway flops. 

It’s relentlessly self-referential but if you can get past that, it’s quite a lot of fun. Bell’s book and Bowen’s lyrics are mostly very witty. The tunes are easy on the ear but undistinguished, reminiscent of a host of middling small scale American tuners from the last couple of decades, although maybe that is kind of the point. 

The original production had a certain lightning-in-a-bottle USP in that the four-strong company was completed by Broadway actress Heidi Blickenstaff and gifted singing comedienne Susan Blackwell playing versions of themselves. Every subsequent iteration is inevitably at one further remove from the material in that you get a cast performing characters called Heidi, Susan, Jeff and Hunter rather than replaying actual lived experiences of the insecurities, disappointments and exhilarations of getting this project off the ground, and the frustrations and joys of being jobbing creatives.

Christopher D Clegg’s new production, first seen in a simpler two nights only version at the Phoenix Arts Club in the summer, has a lot going for it. Principally, there’s Jacob Fowler and Thomas Oxley as Hunter and Jeff, bringing charm, superb comedy timing and a pair of fine, rangy voices to the neurotic twosome at the centre of the piece. Fowler is more driven and bitchy, Oxley goofier and more affable: they’re a terrific team. The female roles aren’t as well written but TikTok star Abbie Budden proves again, after an excellent debut earlier this year in the Cruel Intentions musical, that she is bona fide leading lady material as a likeable, occasionally spiky Heidi. Mary Moore brings stirring vocals to wise-cracking, eternally self-deprecating Susan but reads as way too young and fresh. All the American accents are spot on.

Clegg’s well-judged staging is frenetic but still when it needs to be, and plays out on an attractive set by Hazel McIntosh that, with its multiple raised platforms, Stage Door sign and assorted showbiz bric-à-brac (check out the vintage vinyl cast albums on the shelves), is probably more elaborate than Bowen and Bell originally envisioned. Alistair Lindsay’s lighting design is colourful, malleable and highly effective. Keyboard player and MD Tom Chippendale even gets a few lines of script and is a total delight.

If ultimately [title of show] sometimes threatens to outstay its welcome, it still feels less self-indulgent than the Marlow and Moss’s infinitely more bloated Why Am I So Single? which is covering some of the same thematic ground, only much more loudly, across the river at the Garrick. Clegg’s production of this esoteric, cheeky, intermittently adorable mini-musical is probably as good as it gets, and MT completists should hasten along.