A Big Apple romcom with a HUGE heart...
Two Strangers (Carry A Cake Across New York) (Criterion Theatre, London)
Verdict: Musical cake walk ★★★★☆
Testmatch (Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond)
Verdict: Testing ★☆☆☆☆
Boys On The Verge Of Tears (Soho Theatre, London)
Verdict: Lavatorial larks ★★☆☆☆
The sweet-natured new musical Two Strangers is an endangered species in this age of gender activism. With loveable Sam Tutty alongside Dujonna Gift in a two-person performance, it’s a show that dares to take a basically benign view of people, sex, and even race relations.
Jim Barne and Kit Buchan’s entertainment, first seen in Ipswich in 2019, before going to London’s Kiln, is now in the West end. and it wants nothing more from us than to be charmed by its tale of an excitable young Dougal (Tutty) flying to the Big apple for his estranged father’s wedding.
It’s inspired by romcoms from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to When harry Met Sally and although the set-up is a little forced, with Dad somehow not knowing his son is coming, it’s written with wit and affection and is nicely structured around Dougal’s giddy arrival and hung- over morning after.
he’s a 27-year- old kid who likes to watch Bake Off with his gardener mum, Polly. and, in the hands of Tutty, he’s a credulous creature like Will Ferrell in the movie elf who believes ‘Christmas is the breath of life’.
Gift’s savvy, snappy native New Yorker, robin, who meets him at the airport, considers him perplexing but basically harmless with zero boundaries… until he starts to erode the cynicism with which she protects herself as they carry a four-tier cake across town for the big day.
Clever lyrics ensure the oldfashioned sentiments are tied into the modern world of Tinder and online dating, while music fuses jazz, rap, pop and soul. Tutty yodels a brassy hymn to New York, and Gift enjoys a Whitney houston-ish apotheosis set to cascading drums.
Is Two Strangers too worshipful of the city to make it in New York itself? I suggest they convene a focus group of hardboiled residents to find out. But for us over here, it’s a bighearted cakewalk.
IT’S back to post- colonial gender militants in Testmatch — Kate attwell’s flimsy satire about modern women’s cricket and imperialism in India. rain has stopped play in an england versus India Women’s World Cup match at Lord’s, cueing three from each side to go and bicker in the pavilion about whether only men cheat — and, predictably, to trade a few racist faux pas.
In the second half it’s over to generalised historical caricature of the east India Company in 18th- century Bengal with two women now playing foolish men in powdered wigs. We are told women invented over-arm bowling to avoid their skirts. But the further claim, that the east India Company caused famine by planting indigo and opium, needs a bigger, much more serious work.
If Diane Page’s production is supposed to be a protest play, it’s the sort of feeble bowling our evil patriarchal colonial- capitalist overlords can easily bat away.
AND, sigh, it’s back to our old friend ‘toxic masculinity’ in the repulsive debut of lavvysavvy Sam Grabiner’s Boys On The Verge Of Tears — which won a Verity Bargate award for new writing. It’s set entirely in a men’s lavatory and is the theatrical equivalent of toilet graffiti — a literary form I enjoy in situ, but not so much on stage.
We start with a Dad getting an unseen toddler to perform, and press on to a succession of steadily older youths sparring with insults. having circumnavigated any need for plot or psychological complexity, the play climaxes in the surreal arrival of the Four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Full marks for James Macdonald’s dispiritingly realistic production and ashley Martin-Davis’s memorably revolting design. But similar pleasure can be had by loitering for two hours in a public loo, for the typical cost of 20p.