In London’s West End, two lonely singles are feeling sorry for themselves. Nancy (Leesa Tulley) and her gay, nonbinary best friend, Oliver (Jo Foster), conduct a two-hour inquest into their romantic failures while quaffing cheap bubbly on a peach-colored couch. At the same time, they bat around an idea for a musical based on these travails, which — you guessed it — turns out to be the musical we’re watching.
“Why Am I So Single?” is written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the duo behind “Six,” the breakout hit feminist musical about Henry VIII’s wives. Running at the Garrick Theater through Feb. 13, 2025, this unabashedly crowd-pleasing — though ultimately somewhat vacuous — show goes all in on relatability and schmaltz, carrying a peppy message about friendship and self-care.
The songs unpack the modern dating experience in a mélange of familiar rock and pop styles. “C U Never” is a catchy tap number about the importance of not getting too hung up on people who ghost you. During “Meet Market,” several members of the supporting cast are wheeled around in pink shopping carts to symbolize the transactional nature of online dating. “Disco Ball” is about being the life of the party while feeling lonely inside, and “Men R Trash” is self-explanatory.
In “I Got Off the Plane’” Nancy and Oliver lament their love-hate relationship with the sitcom “Friends,” which they blame for popularizing an unrealistic and heteronormative view of romance — whereupon members of the supporting cast take to the stage in Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer wigs and urge the pair to get over themselves.
The show, directed by Moss, has the chaotic, playful energy of a student revue, with lots of amusingly forced rhymes, tenuous puns and self-aware jokes about the metafictional conceit (“Twist my arm and call me expositional”; “before we rebuild the fourth wall …”). There is a heavy reliance on bathos that borders on the formulaic: Whenever characters pour their hearts out in song, another will immediately say something dismissive. After Nancy sings a tender ballad about her dead father — the only genuinely moving song in the show — Oliver quips, “So what you’re saying is, it was the daddy issues after all?”
The set and costumes have a ramshackle charm. In one scene, a succession of men step out from illuminated rectangular frames representing smartphone screens and belt out cheesy lines from Tinder bios. Members of the supporting ensemble are primarily deployed as singing props, variously dressed as a coat hanger, a fridge, a potted plant and a trash can. (The set is by Moi Tran, the costumes by Max Johns.)
The performers carry the show with their exuberant stage presence and strong vocals — Foster in particular is outstanding, and will surely grace West End stages for many years to come — but they are ill served by the script. While the depictions of dating woe are relatable and fun, the story has nowhere to go. The show fades fast after the intermission, when the focus of the characters turns inward.
We learn that Oliver — who capriciously alternates between he/him and they/them pronouns — is an avoidant type whose sense of humor revolves around deflection; he tends to go after emotionally distant men, and has trouble showing vulnerability because of the shame and homophobia he experienced growing up. Nancy desperately misses her ex-boyfriend while simultaneously struggling with grief, and thinks these two things might be interrelated; she’s at the other end of the spectrum, a bit too trusting.
In the end they realize it’s not so bad because they still have each other, but the celebratory timbre of the climactic scene feels jarringly disproportionate: consolation masquerading as revelation.
The writers have tried to make a virtue of the show’s shortcomings, riffing on the musical’s conceptual flimsiness at various points. This might be cute in another context, but when you’re playing a hallowed venue like the Garrick, people expect a bit more polish. Just before the curtain comes down, Nancy and Oliver wonder aloud if their plot lines weren’t perhaps a bit hackneyed and whether they should have made their characters more aware of this. It’s a clever little metafictional loop, but it doesn’t solve the problem. If anything, it feels a bit like an apology.
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