Why Am I So Single?, Garrick Theatre review - superb songs in Zeitgeist surfing show

Going to the theatre can be a little like going to church. One communes on the individual level, one’s faith in the stories underpinned by a psychological connection, but also on the collective level, belief rising on a tide of shared emotions. Those complementary sensations, in an ever more individualised, screen-and-earplugs world, are rare – and an example of why people pay big bucks for Glastonbury, Taylor Swift and Oasis.

There’s something theatrical, something devotional and even something Swiftie in the air during Why Am I So Single?, the follow-up (that isn’t really) to Six, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s global smash hit. Wisely steering clear of writing Two, a show based on the wives of King Charles III, musical theatre’s wunderkinder have looked into their own lives and created a show set in the living room of Oliver, who is working through their boy problems with their best friend Nancy, who is working through hers. 

They’re writing a musical, big and fancy, and we know they’re Toby and Lucy really, the first of many meta moments, so many that one’s reaction moves from on from wry amusement to impatient irritation. Still, that’s a better result than the pantomimeish elements receive, starting at irritation and going downhill from there.

That is to get ahead of ourselves, because the show’s objective strengths need to be set out before its subjective weaknesses can be contextualised. 

As with their breakout hit, Marlow and Moss deliver one great song after another in a kind of That’s What I Call Musical Theatre! style bravura cycle of genre-hopping, hook-laden, social media friendly bangers. There’s plenty enough material for two shows (indeed, saving a handful or so for a rainy day would have helped a run-time too long for the book to sustain comfortably) but I suspect that superfan playlists are being shared right now and every number will find a slot on plenty.

They’re given full value by two supercharged lead performances. Leesa Tully can be light and poppy one minute and full Adeleish diva-miserablist with “Just In Case” the next, as Nancy wrestles with her emotional need to find a man. She fails because she is continually undermined by the intellectual imperative to reject them as they're a bunch of shits. 

Jo Foster (pictured above) is compelling as the more extrovert Oliver, pinging out the one-liners and dominating the large stage with a body that wriggles as much as their pronouns. They can go full Marilyn for “Shhh!” but then top it by channelling Pete Burns, spinning right round baby, right round in the tour-de-force showstopper “Disco Ball”.

They work well together too on the dating app skewering “Meet Market”, the staging of which is something of an homage to Pulp’s seminal “Common People” video. Ah, common people - there aren’t many of those in this show. Or are there?

I suspect this might be one of the dividing lines that the show will open amongst its audience. Younger people will see their lives reflected back, finding parallels with the struggles Oliver and Nancy face when trying to carve out an identity in terms of gender, sexuality, family and artistic expression in the ruthless online world as much as in the one comprising flesh and blood. Oliver and Nancy are, for many in the house, common people with common concerns.

For older audiences (with the usual caveat that such generalisations can find counter-examples easily), common people are defined as Jarvis Cocker defined them 29 years ago. Then the criteria concerned class, wealth and education and if Friends was a bit heteronormative (we might not have known the word, but we took the point) we just stayed tuned to Channel Four for the world’s most successful gay sitcom, Frasier, finishing off with Antoine and Jean-Paul flirting (and quite a bit more) on the highest of high camp Eurotrash.

Neither of those ways of viewing the world has lesser or greater value than the other, but they do influence how one receives the show. Some will ache with recognition, as Oliver and Nancy dig deeper in deeper into their own psyches exploring where their neuroses come from, how they impact on their endlessly shattering love lives (“8 Dates” is a very funny illustration) and how they can find a way to get from day to day, week to week, year to year. Others will wonder how these two twenty-somethings can afford their lifestyles, why exactly Oliver! is their favourite musical and why they stick to amateur therapy when there are so many professionals out there.

To their credit, Marlow and Moss hold tight to their vision of what is important in their characters’ lives and the resonance of authenticity hums through the house as the Zeitgeist positively twangs with contemporary relevance. 

Ellen Kane (as co-director with Moss, and choreographer) has a lot of fun with a hard-grafting ensemble, who often become anthropomorphic household props and appliances to great comic effect. That conceit helps fill what would otherwise be too intimate a show for its big West End stage - one continually wonders if it wouldn’t be more suited to the Lyric Hammersmith or the Minerva at Chichester Festival Theatre - and there’s some real invention on show to distract us from a set of puns that rather outstays its welcome. 

In many ways, this might be exactly the show a too often overly cautious West End needs right now and the energy in the house was good evidence for that conclusion. But some just won’t make the individual connection, they won’t see enough to invest in Why Am I So Single’s Oliver and Nancy the way they did in Kinky Boots’ Lola and Charlie, to take one example.

But that was 12 years ago, and time waits for no man, no woman, no non-binary person. Least of all for Marlow and Moss, who are moving mainstream theatre on fast-forward again.

• Why Am I So Single? at the Garrick Theatre until 13 February
  
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