Parking Spot: the Musical review – not just park and bark

As someone recently forced to spend a week hunting for parking in Los Angeles, I can understand the plight at the heart of Parking Spot the Musical – how hard it is to find any form of convenient parking in a US population centre.

Asking friends and colleagues, they’ve confirmed that the premise for Louis Armistead, Erick Eiser and Dashel Hammerstein’s new musical, about a street-based conflict to try and bag a highly-coveted residential parking spot in New Jersey, is very much grounded in fact.

Which is a great place to start for a musical with oodles of charm and witty lyrics. The amiable cousin of shows like Avenue Q or Little Shop of Horrors, it follows Will, a New Jersey resident finally purchasing his first car – only to discover he has nowhere to park it. When an elderly apartment owner dies and his space is made available, a free-for-all Battle Royale begins to try and claim the space before the parking attendant makes their rounds…

Director Juju Jaworski does strong work keeping a well-drilled cast moving across the fringe space, with no set really needed to conjure up the sense of incessant congestion. Eiser and Hammerstein’s tunes are charming – never mould-breaking but very much listenable and good fun for an hour’s entertainment.

Some slightly awkward sound design aside (some lyrics are entirely lost, especially for pivotal side characters), Armistead’s key problems lie in two places. Structurally, numbers seem to end without much forward momentum, relying on too many blackouts and making Will’s plight feel more episodic than it needs to.

Secondly, even at under an hour’s runtime, the plot sags thanks to too long being spent amongst the cartoonishly thin ensemble of characters – there’s huge scope here for a more satirical edge, especially around issues of gentrification and urban change.

That said, it’s a witty show crafted by talents definitely driving in the right lane – let’s hope their next parking spot will be the holy grail.

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