In practice this means Nancy (Leesa Tulley) and Oliver, who alternates between he/him and they/them pronouns (alternate Jordan Cambridge-Taylor,) sitting around the latter's flat worrying less about the musical, and more about their disappointing love lives. And yes, among the odd reference to other classic musicals, all the characters are named after characters from Oliver Exclamation Mark.
Early on this seemed like it could be an easy entry into this year's Top Ten shows, but I found it increasingly souring for me: It earns a huge amount of goodwill, then goes on to abuse it. One thing that's hard to fault is, unsurprisingly, the songs, from a team whose previous work's success was to a huge degree dependent on the music standing alone on Spotify. These range from big ballads to disco numbers and genre songs that border on pastiche: To give us an early 2000s feel when they're binge-rewatching Friends, Tulley goes into full Avril Latrine mode. The title song is reprised often so it's not quite surprising if you walk out humming it, but Oliver's "Disco Ball" is as much of an earworm after one listen, a brash dance number with a building anger underneath it. Choreographer Ellen Kane gets a lot of showstopping numbers out of a twink-heavy ensemble.
Initially I was also really charmed by the audacity of the show's constructed sense of the haphazard: Max Johns' costumes take the conceit of the ensemble playing props and furniture in the flat and gives them the full big-budget feel while still being full of personality. My favourite variation on the running Oliver! joke was a café called "Olive A Twist," a name only seen written backwards on a window of Moi Tran's set. Noah Thomas absolutely nails the assignment to be a scene-stealer in his big first-act tap number, and the leads announce that he'll definitely need to make another appearance in the second as a result. The flagrant metatheatrical pointing out of the writers' own self-indulgence is knowing enough that it really works, until it doesn't.
This was always going to have to show a different kind of ambition from SIX, but that had six incredibly eventful lifetimes to fill just over an hour with, and a concert format that meant very little spoken dialogue. Here a specific element of two people's lives tries to fill nearly three hours, and on the way out Vanessa said she found the scenes between songs to easily be the weakest element. We also agreed that the constant interrupting of the songs and scenes for another metatheatrical element or distraction ultimately sabotages the pace: The end of the first act is a great idea, as the characters are at risk of actually confronting their own issues, so as an avoidance technique a bee turns up in the flat and they do a big ensemble number trying to get rid of it. The trouble is in the preceding moments they'd already spent so much time extending the central issues that the gag felt to me like just more of the same.
Just like its predecesssor, I suspect Why Am I So Single?'s songs will be a welcome addition to my playlists, but unlike it I found it oustayed its welcome. A great cast in Moss and Kane's production are hard to fault, but this ends up one of those shows whose biggest strength - its twinkle-eyed, tongue-in-cheek embracing of its own metatheatricality - is overused to the point of becoming its biggest weakness.
Why Am I So Single? by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss is booking until the 13th of February at the Garrick Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Danny Kaan, Matt Crockett.
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