Theatre review: Soho Cinders

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This review is of the penultimate preview performance.

Soho Cinders is a long-gestating project from Stiles and Drewe, the songwriters behind last year's Betty Blue Eyes and the new songs in Mary Poppins. And though musical theatre is famed for being popular with a gay audience, you can see why a show as overtly gay as this one wouldn't quite be looking at a big West End run. Instead it gets an appropriate berth as Soho Theatre, just up the road from its Old Compton Street setting. Robbie (Tom Milner) is a student whose mother died without leaving a will, leaving him at the mercy of the two stepsisters who want to get hold of the launderette that should rightfully be his to inherit. Instead Robbie has to support himself by becoming a rent boy, but he's also having a secret relationship with James Prince, a popular, engaged candidate for London mayor. (Although, how exactly it's a secret is anyone's guess; I'm sure there's less public meeting places than at the foot of the Trafalgar Square lions.)