Stalled: A New Musical – King’s Head Theatre

Picture: Johan Persson

Stalled: A New Musical continues at the King’s Head Theatre, London until 23 March 2025.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

The pun in the title for Stalled is so large that it almost seems as if this new musical, receiving its world premiere after US-based workshops in 2022 and 2023, was created afterwards to justify the title. “What if,” we can easily imagine the creators cry, “it’s all set among the stalls of a ladies’ room, and everyone who passes through there has stalled at some point in their life?”

If that really were the case, and the pun beget a musical laden with revelatory numbers about finding the spark that reignites one’s life, it would be forgivable. And while that does seem to be the aim of the piece, unfortunately the content does not do the conceit justice at all.

Liesl Wilke’s book revolves around Maggie (Lauren Ward), who has taken up residence as a sort of caretaker in an upmarket toilet in a Seattle office block, as she struggles with the grief around losing her daughter, Robin (Rebecca-Jo Roberts), whose ghostly form is hanging around.

With Robin gone, Maggie starts to act maternally towards some of the toilet’s regular users. Regina Co’s Krystal is a lesbian coder who struggles with hiding her identity from her conservative Korean mother, and with her crush on a work colleague; Serena (Evita Khrime) is a barista/spoken word artist facing a pregnancy scare; and Emma (Grace Venus) is a young girl who loves the colour blue, and whose potential autism is one of many stresses impacting her mother, Cynthia (Josie Benson).

Director Vikki Stone animates the large cast around Emily Bestow’s suitably bougie-looking set, even though the requirement for multiple toilet cubicles and wash basins barely leaves enough space for anything else. Not that this is a musical that lends itself to big dance numbers – movement director Dannielle Rhimes Lecointe is rarely troubled. Some numbers attempt to enliven proceedings (lavatory brushes used as backing singers’ microphones, etc), but generally this is a talky, ballad-laden affair.

But a show that’s big on emotion and slow on pace requires book, music and lyrics that can maintain the interest throughout the 90-minute running time. Sadly, this is Stalled’s biggest failure. Wilke’s book has each character knowing what their character’s issue is and how to resolve it, each expressing their issue in therapy-like language. That robs us of any sense of interest in the characters’ various predicaments, as well as rending many of the songs useless; we learn nothing from the lyrics (by composer Andy Marsh and Wilke, with additional music and lyrics by Kyle Puccia) that was not already inherent in the characters’ dialogue.

Matters aren’t helped by so much of both the dialogue and the songs being performed in an overwrought style. Marsh’s music is also at fault here, with precious little variety of tempo or style, making the show’s catalogue of numbers sound like offcuts from a lesser Scott Alan album.

Other missteps include the handling of Emma’s autism diagnosis, which despite a beautiful portrayal by Venus is really only viewed from her mother’s perspective (whose realisation that her daughter is ‘Different, Not Broken’ is treated as some miraculous insight). Khrime has to struggle with the delivery of some truly atrocious poetry that one assumes is not supposed to be quite so bad as it is.

Worst of all, Ward – who makes a sterling effort to make Maggie as likeable as she is spiky – is underserved by a character resolution that is little more than having waited out grief. There’s no great realisation, no learning involved; and that, too, goes for most of the other characters’ arcs.

Stalled’s premise is an interesting one: the cross section of Seattle people who regularly use one ladies’ room could well have an interesting collection of stories to tell. Sadly, no such stories are in evidence here. Stalled may have a great pun for a title, but otherwise it’s a busted flush.

Scott Matthewman