Why Am I So Single? West End review – a heartfelt, meta-theatrical marvel

How do you follow a musical megahit like Six? That’s been the dilemma facing writers Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss ever since their show about Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives took the world by storm six years ago.

Well, as it turns out, the answer is really simple. You write a fabulous show about two writers who are best friends and are recognisably you, trying to write a successful hit musical, while agonising about their unhappy love lives. Oh, and you call them Oliver and Nancy so that you can offer a long string of jokes about the musical Oliver! Plus a parody number in tribute.

Such a meta-theatrical conceit could have backfired. Yet Why Am I So Single? is warm, bold and overflowing with ideas. Not all of them land, but its fizzing generosity makes it one of the most enticing new musicals since, well, Six. It may not have the same broad appeal as that show, but it boasts sensational performances from Jo Foster and Leesa Tulley. It feels like a hit.

Its energy and bravery spring from its wild inventiveness. Moss’s production (with co-director Ellen Kane also providing lively, tight choreography) turns actors into bins, a fridge (magnet reading ‘Live, Love, Sob’) and curtains in the flat where our sadsack couple sit on a sofa and sip prosecco while trying to answer the question in the title.

Moi Tran’s set and Max Johns’ costumes are bright, versatile and keep the action moving fluidly from place to place, providing settings that hold each song. The tunes are the key to the action. In “8 Dates”, for example, Oliver outlines a series of disastrous cancellations; it’s a jaunty pop number, performed at high speed, with the potential dates framed in neon windows, like the screen of a phone. It’s funny, frantic, and paints a relatable picture of the perils of online hookups.

Or there’s “Just in Case”, a standout ballad, where Nancy admits that if her dreadful ex called her back, she’d drop everything to be with him, sung straight and sad. But there’s also “Interlude in B Minor”, which begins because “There’s a bee in the flat” and exists only for the sheer joy of bee puns and the pleasure of putting someone in a bee outfit onstage. And “Men R Trash”, a scintillating number for a chorus line brandishing red bin bags, gets cut short as the writers run out of belief in front of us.

The performances match the quality of the writing. Tulley is clear-voiced and open as Nancy, listening intently and with impressive stillness as mayhem unfolds around her. Noah Thomas is enormous fun as the waspish Artie. “Why are you so single? Because you’re both so weird and intense.” The ensemble is terrific.

But Foster, in a pink T-shirt covered with hearts and a short red skirt, holds the whole thing together with astonishing charisma. Their precise timing, which makes the most of Marlow and Moss’s deadpan wit – “I met him in a bar. No, of course, I didn’t. I didn’t realise I was in 1800” – constantly hints at something sadder and softer beneath. In “Disco Ball”, the fabulous confessional ferocity of their performance, singing of the protective need to “turn yourself into a disco ball, making a room sparkle”, is beautifully undercut by the sudden “That was a bit much”.

The show does this all the time, going big and then pulling back to examine what it has just presented. But its wry tone and its vitality is underpinned by a truthful portrait of just how difficult it is to find love in these modern, confusing times – and by the honesty and the relationship at its heart.

Its hymn to the pleasure of friendship is what tethers its exuberance to the ground and makes it so moving as well as so funny. There are moments when it could be pulled back, and it is marginally long, but once you give it your heart, it holds you.