The lighting may be dim in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s auditorium – reconfigured to resemble an atmospheric 1960s NYC cabaret club – but the star wattage is bright. It’s not hard to see why American musical theatre powerhouse Ben Platt was attracted to the British debut of Mark Sonnenblick’s 2018 off-Broadway show. A two-hander, it’s a great vehicle for his talents as a singer and actor.
But there’s more to this funny, sad and wistful piece – directed here by David Cromer – than that. It’s New York, 1965, and Platt is Trevor, the singing half of a performing and romantic duo, alongside songwriter Arthur (Gregor Milne). It’s an era when being gay is a threat to life and livelihood. We are Trevor’s audience in smoky Greenwich Village club the Never Get as he tells – and sings – the story of their turbulent relationship and contrasting careers.
The way in which Sonnenblick, partly through Trevor’s casual asides, creates in Arthur a fictional superstar of the great American songbook, is a delicious blurring of reality and theatrical invention. This is heightened by his score and lyrics, which are lushly evocative of Cole Porter. They feel like songs you almost remember. But as Arthur (initially) insists on keeping male pronouns in these classically framed love songs, they become – in one of the show’s strongest through-lines – a powerful social lens.
But there’s an engrossingly thorny knottiness – which Sonnenblick, to his credit, doesn’t untangle – to Trevor’s increasing conflict with Arthur over the latter’s insistence that achieving mainstream success is the route to equality, not the rising tide of 1960s activism. It’s a nice dovetailing of the age-old story of what people will sacrifice for success via what ‘social acceptance’ looks like. Are Arthur’s catchy standards subversive or a cop-out?
As the show drops increasingly heavy hints that we’re watching a revue that may not necessarily be taking place on the corporeal plane, its meta-theatricality and fourth-wall-breaking cleverness sometimes gets in its own way. The convoluted framing risks pulling focus from the stingingly bittersweet heft of its core story. Thankfully, Cromer never loses sight of this, keeping intimacy, self-doubt and regret central as Trevor wanders around us. It’s as slippery, tricky and romantic as a painful memory.
Milne does a great job of embodying an Arthur who is as much a self-serving – and, at times, self-lacerating – spectral creation of Trevor’s imagination as he is a real person. He moves fluidly between boiling creative intensity and being the cruel echo of a broken relationship. The snatches of tenderness he and Platt sketch as he plays the on-stage piano are the piece’s moorings. There’s also a lovely last act performance by Barry James – fragile, poignant but impishly defiant – as Trevor literally faces his mortality.
But the main plaudits ultimately go to Platt – and deservedly so. As Arthur observes to Trevor at one point, he never sounded that good in life. But Platt does. He’s simultaneously charismatic and achingly vulnerable, sending a gorgeous shiver through every song or landing a wisecrack with a practised twinkle. He perfectly inhabits the demeanour of a performer from yesteryear until, suddenly, heartbreakingly, dropping it in stillness.
