First Date – Crazy Coqs

First Date, a musical streamed from Crazy Coqs, London, continues until 24 October 2020.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Two-hander boutique musicals have been staged before in the Crazy Coqs cabaret room at Zédel’s but First Date is different, a full-blown online show about the dating game with a cast of five that ran for five months on Broadway back in 2013.

With music and lyrics by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner, based on their personal experiences of the singles scene in New York, it follows the well-trodden path of opposites attracting and a mismatched date set up by family and friends surprisingly working out.

Aaron, a blind date virgin, overdressed and a bag of nerves, meets serial dater Casey, a cool chick with a track record of picking “bad boys” as a defence mechanism because when relationships inevitably go tits-up, the letdown is more bearable.

The songs are decent and the superb cast of Samantha Barks, Simon Lipkin, Oscar Conlon-Morrey, Danielle Steers and Nicholas McLean do more than justice to a rather wordy and predictable script (book by Austin Winsberg).

As a follower of Barks’ career ever since she finished third as a 17-year-old in I’d Do Anything, Lloyd Webber’s TV contest to unearth a Nancy for Oliver! in 2008, stardom always beckoned. What a feast that was for talent-spotters with Jessie Buckley, now one of our finest actresses, and Come From Away star Rachel Tucker also in the mix behind winner Jodie Prenger.

Barks’ award-winning Eponine in the movie version of Les Misérables and getting the Julia Roberts part in Pretty Woman on Broadway were notable milestones and in Casey she gets to the bottom of a complex character as well as revealing a perfect American accent. Her delivery of ‘Saved’, the show’s most notable ballad, is faultless.

Lipkin has the tightly-wound Aaron off to a T, making all the mistakes that first-date beginners make – talking about your ex and bringing up religion are apparently definite no-nos, he Jewish, she an atheist, he imagining his late mother scolding him about “not finding a nice Jewish girl” – but loosening up when he discovers they had mutual friends back in their youth in Michigan.

Steers attacks her songs boldly in a variety of parts – Casey’s married friend Lauren, Aaron’s ex Alison (sexy in his fantasy but decidedly average in reality, this versatile actress switching from one to the other brilliantly), Aaron’s mother and granny among them – while McLean is spot-on as Aaron’s best friend Gabe among other cameos.

But all are outshone by that inveterate scene-stealer Conlon-Morrey who must be the funniest man on the London stage. A man of many parts in the hit musical Only Fools and Horses, he plays the meddling but well-meaning waiter who does all he can to make the misfits’ date memorable, he’s also a man of the cloth, the puppeteer who pulls the strings on a mock-up of Casey’s mythical four-year-old son, the guy who introduces the show and goodness knows what else.

He’s the James Corden of the 2020s or, going back to the 1960s, a camp version of Harry Secombe, both larger than life, both with a goonish sense of humour, a variety of silly voices and, when they are serious, displaying a fine tenor.

Using the bar at the Crazy Coqs as the focal point of the show, director Dean Johnson employs some video pyrotechnics to great effect with the waiters literally popping up and then magically being put back in their boxes while musical supervisor Adam Hoskins and MD Josh Winstone deal handsomely with the contemporary rock score.

Jeremy Chapman