This incorrigibly likable romcom comes to the UK with a series of sold out runs in New York and Los Angeles in its wake. You can see why: it slips down as easily and pleasantly as an old-school, Saturday-night TV meet-cute. Except writer Douglas Lyons’ story is a meet-again-cute because the couple at its centre are exes.
It has been several years since air steward Jada (Marisha Wallace) and aspiring music producer Dallas (Jamael Westman) felt the sting of each other’s betrayals. Now they are sitting at table 17 to hash out unfinished business – and maybe relight the fire? We first meet them moments before the nervy reunion.
What plays out is sparky fun, spanning the couple’s history in a similar manner to Nick Payne’s Constellations, sliding from present to past and back. Its ambition to double up as a serious relationship drama is not always met because of the imbalance of cutesy humour. The play treads similar ground to such recently successful romantic two-handers as Benedict Lombe’s Shifters but is not as emotionally freighted, and nor does it have the larger social framework.
The point here, it seems, is to entertain with comedy and elicit sentiment from romance. It works to please the crowd and melt your heart a little by the end, the actors raising the effect of the too-soft humour to make lines sound more sparkling than they are. Unfaithful acts and insecurities generate the drama, although this couple remain a little too generic.
Under the direction of Zhailon Levingston, the dazzle around the script does a good job, from the music (Chaka Khan’s I’m Every Woman and some nostalgic 90s numbers) to sharp lighting design by Matt Haskins and freeze-frames that denote movement between present and past. Amy Jane Cook’s set design is the most dazzling of all – a horseshoe-shaped banquette, jauntily positioned, that revolves through the timelines and a sultry stage lit up by neon. There are plenty of cheeky theatrical touches as Wallace and Westman make lightning-quick work of returning to the past and changing costumes, as well as giving soul-baring asides to us, in the middle of an emotionally dissembling scene.
Michael Rishawn, who takes on several ancillary parts, almost steals the show with his gay restaurant host, who has a backstory of unwelcome singledom that you want to hear more about – maybe more so than the break-up-make-up drama of the couple. Still, there is great, energetic acting from the leads: the always magnetic Wallace, in a non-singing role here, oozes charisma although you do want her to burst into song in the vein of the Kiln’s previous romantic two-hander, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York). Westman fills Dallas with life, sensitively balancing his ridiculousness with his depth of emotional injury.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
