Ushers: The Front of House Musical at the Other Palace Studio – review
It’s a difficult time for ushers at the moment – perhaps even more so than usual. Huge divides between how audiences expect to treat the theatre and how venues expect them to behave seem to be growing every day, post-pandemic, and no matter where you fall on the question of theatre etiquette, it’s hard to deny that ushers are often on the front lines of dealing with this mismatch.
With this in mind, it seems a decent time to bring back Ushers, a studio musical which originally debuted in the UK in 2014, and returns now with an updated script to place it firmly in 2024.
The show is set around front of house at the fictional press night of Love Island: The Musical at the Another Palace Theatre. As you might guess from this setting, Ushers is both cheeky and very, very stagey: a night out really aimed at the musical theatre in-crowd. Over the course of the night, we follow five ushers through their shift, as they deal with audience members, fight off the bizarrely evil duty manager (Daniel Paige), and have the classic customer-service-job deep and life-changing conversations.
The various subplots do feel a bit flimsy, such as when boyfriends Gary (Cleve September) and Ben (Luke Bayer), both actors alongside their ushering jobs, almost break up because Gary has booked a job abroad – or when plucky newcomer Lucy (Danielle Rose) assumes that heartthrob Stephen (Christopher Foley) is gay. It’s hard to be quite as invested in these plots as in either the jokes, which are genuinely very funny, or in the songs, which mimic and parody famous musical theatre moments to great effect.
Separately, Robin, the bitter duty manager who had always dreamt of being an opera star, sometimes strays into an uncomfortable leeriness, which works much better the more ridiculous and less real he feels. Paige really shines as Robin in the instructional videos that intersperse the scenes, showing the ushers (with little success) how to perform some of their basic duties, and he’s wonderful to watch in his two (yes, two!) ballads.
The Other Palace Studio is a difficult venue for sound and, unfortunately, Ushers suffers because of this. The cast are all great performers – with Rose and Bethany Amber Perrins as stagey TikTokker Rosie having particularly good turns in their solo numbers – but it’s too hard to get the balance right in the space and, in group numbers in particular, it’s difficult to follow what’s happening. Director Max Reynolds and choreographer Adam Haigh use the space well though, and the songs especially are great fun to watch.
Overall, Ushers feels mostly like a non-seasonal pantomime for musical theatre fans, which is absolutely to its credit. Even in the small space, the show really is at its strongest when parodying or excelling within in-joke territory, or when it fully commits to its own razzle-dazzle.
