Police Cops: The Musical – Southwark Playhouse Borough

Tom Roe and Zachary Hunt in Police Cops: The Musical at Southwark Playhouse Borough, London. Picture: Pamela Raith

Police Cops: The Musical continues at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 14 October 2023.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

If you have an ear to the dirty, sticky ground of the UK comedy theatre scene, you may well be aware of Police Cops already. Writer-performers Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Roe have built a series of hit shows around the idea, gathering a fervent following, winning awards and selling out Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Vault Festival runs along the way. For their latest run at Southwark Playhouse, they have made their most ambitious work yet: an actual musical. Will combining their tried-and-true formula with musical theatre ruin Police Cops? Will it ruin musical theatre itself? Maybe one or both was damaged, but it was damn sure worth it.

This show is a satire of 1980s cop movies. The tropes are recognisable, but somehow the team is clever enough to always take you by surprise. There are inspired moments of invention, and even when you think you may be able to predict a punchline of a joke, they take things one or 12 steps further and leave you horrified and disgusted and overjoyed. The pace is relentless and the satire is sharp. The team has clearly mastered the art of silliness by this point, and with comedy perfection like this, maybe adding an ambitious new element of musical theatre would be a major risk to a winning formula? Fortunately, it only makes things sweeter.

Musician Ben Adams has enjoyed recent success with the brilliant Eugenius!, and he brings similar ’80s-pastiche energy to Police Cops: The Musical. The score is genuinely rocking in that enjoyable but slightly unfashionable ’80s way, the lyrics (by Hunt, Parkinson and Roe) are unfailingly hilarious, and the melodies are catchy as all hell. Musical director Gabriel Chernick plays keys and leads an exceptionally tight and surprisingly large-sounding three-piece band, also featuring Daniel Vildosola on guitar and Rory Clark on drums.

Now that the Police Cops are working on the grand scale of musical theatre, they have had to draft in some new recruits. Melinda Orengo and Natassia Bustamante play perfectly with the core trio of Hunt, Parkinson and Roe. Their comic sensibilities are perfectly in tune, and the two newbies may even have the edge when it comes to technical vocal performance. Both are given ample opportunity to indulge their inner ’80s power ballad diva, and these moments are some of the highlights of the show.

It could be argued that as ‘merely’ a comedy show wrapping its established formula around the structure of a musical, Police Cops: The Musical is perhaps not an exemplar of pure musical theatre, but that feels a little beside the point. There is a clear love for the form in evidence, with the traditional “I want” song and Act I ending “all-skate” numbers firmly in place. The team understand what works about musical theatre and are using it, paying tribute to it, and mocking it only in the most affectionate way. The fact they have clearly put so much effort into perfecting Matt Cole’s excellent choreography shows they are taking this endeavour seriously

The team’s affection for ’80s cop films is also obvious but here, the knives are most definitely out. Every cliché is torn apart, and those movies’ violence, sexism and racism don’t go unpunished either. Most impressively, the team uses this exceptionally silly satire to make some timely and thought-provoking points on the role of policing in our society, though not at the expense of laughs or the audience’s good time. Some moments of the show felt so universally funny that I lost count of the number of people I decided then-and-there I had to invite along to future dates. Other jokes felt as though they were written specifically for me and my silly sense of humour, until the rest of the crowd roared with laughter too. For my money (and at Southwark Playhouse prices we’re not talking about very much money compared to West End alternatives), this is the funniest show in London bar none. Don’t miss out.

Ian Bowkett