Theatreland is taking a gamble on a wave of quirky little shows to challenge the big but tired box office beasts
A fresh kind of musical theatre show, set apart by having started life on the fringe or in a small-scale provincial production, is challenging the established order in London’s West End this season.
A wave of new, quirky productions will be taking their places alongside Phantom of the Opera-style classics and all those big, popular musicals that rework a familiar film title or milk a superstar legacy.
Latest to graduate to the major league is Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), an acclaimed British musical which has just been rewarded this weekend with a run at the Criterion theatre on Piccadilly from April. “It has not sunk in yet,” said its writer Kit Buchan. “Hearing that it will be on in the West End is a bit like the answer to a prayer. But it feels so unlikely: I am not sure I will really believe it until I see the curtain go up.”
Buchan wrote the show with his friend Jim Barne after they decided to branch out from writing songs for the band they have played in together since school. Audiences and critics responded enthusiastically. The show, developed over seven years and now finishing a sold-out run at the Kiln in north London, has earned rave reviews. The Evening Standard critic said the two-hander musical “matches its wide-eyed hero and sardonic heroine with just the right mix of sugar and sour”.
There are high hopes, too, for another unconventional show, Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder!. It impressed critics at the Edinburgh fringe, and is now poised for a West End run.
“New British musicals are having a moment, and that is really exciting,” said its producer, Francesca Moody, who brought Phoebe Waller Bridge’s Fleabag to the stage. “This is the riskier end of a risky market, but there are a group of producers who are prepared to take it up a gear by backing writers with shows that are not based on existing book or film titles. And the West End is making room for them in the ecosystem.”
An affectionate whodunnit parody, Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder!, began as a lockdown project for writers Jon Brittain and Matthew Floyd Jones. Moody is aware that keeping the charm of this small production when it’s in a big London theatre will be crucial. “You have to hold on to the things that have made it successful, like the reusing of the set and the multi-casting. Those elements, the pace and the velocity of movement, make it satisfying.”
By transferring to the West End, these small shows will follow a path recently laid by new musicals including Jack Godfrey’s Babies, which is tipped to return to the West End after a tryout last year, and Operation Mincemeat, a word-of-mouth hit which has won huge audience loyalty. Leading the charge was Six, the musical about the wives of Henry VIII. Written by two students for the Edinburgh festival, it has gone on to reach big audiences internationally. Next up in the West End will be Starter for Ten, adapted by Emma Hall & Charlie Parham from the David Nicholls book and 2006 film, with songs by pop-punk composer Tom Rasmussen.
“There is an interest in musicals from younger audiences now,” said Barne. The show he has created with Buchan, a funny riff on the romcom, has already won two industry prizes. In the lead roles are Dujonna Gift and award-winner Sam Tutty – who both starred in Dear Evan Hansen – as young wedding guests who meet at JFK airport. The show, originally called The Season, ran in several provincial theatres before catching the eye of the Kiln’s artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, who will be taking over from Rufus Norris at the National Theatre.
According to the old joke, the fastest route to the bright lights of the West End is “practice, practice, practice”. In recent years, though, it has seemed quicker to simply string together a juke-box musical, or adapt a hit film. Musicals based on the songs of Tina Turner, Whitney Houston or Frankie Valli, together with all-singing, all-dancing versions of films such as Mrs Doubtfire, Back to the Future and Pretty Woman, have recently dominated.
But these small, new musicals are reassuring proof that practice and new creative talent can still count: “We made a joke that if we ever had a show on in the West End, we would both get a tattoo,” said Buchan, a performance poet, who has also written for the Observer. That tattoo now looks like a certainty, and will be of a small bat, not the wedding cake of the show’s title.
Neither is planning to leave their day job yet however: they claim that rumours of the money to be made with a West End musical are exaggerated. Buchan, like the hero of his show, works in a cinema, and Barne for a music publisher in Wiltshire.
Despite many younger people having a prejudice against musicals, they were drawn to the form because they wanted to write songs that “were more answerable to the story, and the characters and, of course, the audience”, says Buchan. “People do look down on musicals because they so clearly want to be loved. But we felt liberated from the pressure to be edifying. You can just be entertaining.”