Picture: Anna Clare Photography
Love Quirks continues at The Other Palace Studio, London until 12 October 2025.
Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩
When it comes to musical shows whose numbers are all on one theme, perhaps the best format is the bookless revue. Maltby and Shire’s Closer Than Ever comes to mind, as does Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts’s I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. In each of those shows, the spaces between songs may be populated by skits or set-ups, preparing the audience for the mood of the next number.
What neither of those musical revues has is a plot-based book. And sadly, Love Quirks: A New Musical demonstrates exactly why that is.
Seth Bisen-Hersh’s songs all deal with the tortuous world of dating and relationships, as seen through the eyes of young twenty-somethings. But in the world of Mark Childers’ book, they all take place from the point of view of the same four people, here transferred to London from its 2022 Off-Broadway run (some references to “takeout” and “mom” betray its American origins).
Best friends Lili and Stephanie share a flat with Ryan, Lili’s unrequited love (and prom date) from high school who she yearns for years after he came out. When Ryan briefly moves out to move in with his new boyfriend, he sublets his room to his American friend Chris, who is just coming out of a failed relationship – but Chris and Steph briefly dated years ago, before he ghosted her. With Stephanie in the last throes of a messy divorce, the prospect of a reunion dangles in front of the pair.
The problem with this set-up is that Bisen-Hersh’s numbers like to explore the start, or the failed start, of relationships more than their long-term ramifications. And that means that the characters must likewise be stuck in the same rut throughout the duration of the play.
And that means that everything is played out on the same level for the show’s two-hour duration. Both Clodagh Greene’s Stephanie and Ayesha Patel’s Lili are completely strung out all the time, afforded little to no time of quiet between shouting distraught dialogue and belting in song. Lewis Bear Brown, saddled with every gay stereotype in his character of Ryan, at least manages to derive some semblance of humour from his character, particularly with an entertaining Act II number, ‘Um Yeah…’, in which we only hear his side of what sounds like the world’s most excruciating first date.
The women also each get their one good comedy number, with caveats. Greene gets ‘Hey!’, an awkward attempt to catch up with a guy at the bar, that would be way funnier if the book didn’t require her to act very drunk during the number. And Patel’s standout number, ‘This is Awkward’, deals with returning to work after a one-night stand with a colleague in a way that might be more endearing if director Cecilie Fray were not so keen to have Lili being so strung out all the time.
Within this maelstrom of unresolved angst, it is a shame that Tom Newland, who as Chris seems to be the strongest singer of the quartet, dominates the book rather than the songs. His on-off flirtations with Steph, and the dominance within his psyche of both his most recent failed engagement and an attempt to start a new one, are about as moderately interesting as Childers’ book ever gets.
Even then, the dialogue is frequently tedious and repetitive – a line about Steph’s therapist giving the worst advice is repeated three times in as many minutes – making it hard to root for any of the characters’ love lives. Many of the songs don’t help, either. Bisen-Hersh clearly loves a tango-paced melody, almost as much as he loves Stephen Sondheim’s use of awkward metre and unusual rhyming schemes – without appreciating the hard work and precision with which the master composer prepared his numbers.
While some of the comedy numbers have their charms, they’re surrounded by a morass of tedium. The book’s introduction of plot, combined with the necessity of no character ever moving forward, only adds to the frustration. This is also coupled with dialogue and lyrics that feel as if they’re written by someone from a previous age, from Ryan’s painful coming-out song to the concept of shame suggested for having met someone online.
The result is a musical that, far from encouraging us to empathise with the concept of unrequited love, makes us grateful that the quartet of characters are not inflicting themselves on anybody else. Love Quirks may have something to say about modern love, but the small amount of decent content that does so is completely drowned out.
Scott Matthewman
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