StarKid’s The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals – West End review

There is a particular kind of evening in the theatre where the show on stage and the experience of attending it are two almost entirely separate things. The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals is one of those evenings.

StarKid, the American musical theatre collective who built their following through online content and devoted word-of-mouth, have been a fixture on the concert circuit for years. This, however, is their first full London production, and the Apollo was ready for them. Long before the curtain went up, the air had a quality to it that is rarely found outside a cult gathering or a very enthusiastic football terrace. The crowd knew the show by rote: every lyric, every entrance, every beat. They whooped when characters appeared, laughed with raucous recognition at jokes landed from the stage, and gave the whole evening the atmosphere of a homecoming rather than a first night.

For those already in the circle, this was almost certainly the night of their lives. For the uninitiated, it was rather more complicated.

The show itself is a comedic musical horror, following a small American town gradually overtaken by a mysterious infection that compels its victims to burst spontaneously into song. The premise is sharp and the target is clear: an affectionate but pointed dig at the conventions of the musical theatre form itself. As an idea, it has genuine wit, and in its opening exchanges there is real promise. The tone is established briskly, the central conceit is well deployed, and there are enough early laughs to suggest the show knows exactly what it is doing. Then it loses the thread, and never quite finds it again.

What follows is less a story with momentum than a loose collection of scenes, each entertaining enough in isolation but rarely building on what came before. The characters drift through situations rather than driving them, and without that narrative propulsion, the emotional investment simply drains away. By the time the production reaches its centrepiece, “Show Stoppin’ Number,” an enormous, deliberately over-the-top comedy set piece, the audience are theoretically primed for something spectacular. In practice, because the narrative has been meandering for some time, the song arrives into something of a vacuum. It has its moments, and its ambition is not in doubt, but it outstays its welcome by a considerable margin. A joke that depends on escalation only escalates as far as the goodwill it has banked. For the devotees, that bank was full. For everyone else, the funds had run rather low.

The songs, broadly, suffer a similar problem. They are not bad, competently written and performed with evident commitment, but very few of them have anything to lodge in the memory once you leave the building. A musical that satirises the form probably needs its songs to be doing more work than these manage, and when the lyrics lean on the logic of the show’s own internal mythology, there is a creeping sense that the laughs are being shared with a room full of people who already know the punchline.

The cast are a personable and energetic bunch, and their enthusiasm for the material is infectious. But this is very much an ensemble effort, and an uneven one at that. The production shares that quality: enthusiastic and committed, clearly with a genuine love for what it is doing, but rough around the edges. On press night, persistent microphone issues did not help matters, with several performers losing the opening moments of their dialogue as the sound system struggled to catch up. A technical problem rather than a performance one, but it frayed concentration at precisely the moments when a new character needed to make an impression.

Here is the thing, though. All of this is a review written from outside the clique, and that is a distinction worth making explicit. The audience at the Apollo on Thursday evening were not watching a flawed musical and politely applauding its better moments. They were having a genuinely extraordinary time. The energy in that building was not manufactured and it was not courtesy. It was real, and it was remarkable, and StarKid earned it through years of building something that clearly means a great deal to a great many people.

Judged purely as a piece of musical theatre, on story, on song, on craft, The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals is arguably a two-star show. Judged as an event, as a live experience shared between a company and an audience who have been waiting years for precisely this moment, it is something you could say goes beyond a conventional review.