U.Me: The Musical – BBC World Service

U.Me: The Musical is available via podcast, on BBC Sounds and the BBC website.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Attempts to dramatise the events of the last year have a tendency to focus on the cycle of Zoom calls, and the loneliness inherent in communication solely by video chat.

A year on, and works are emerging which dig a little deeper. None do it quite so richly as BBC World Service musical podcast U.Me (pronounced ‘you dot me’), in which Anoushka Lucas’ Rose – who moved to London just over a year ago, only to find herself confined to a flat such that she could have been working anywhere – finds a kindred spirit in Ryo (Martin Sarreal) a colleague who works for the same multinational company and who is sitting out the pandemic in the Tokyo flat of his friends Kenji (Kevin Shen) and Alyssa (Nicole Deon).

A musical which runs as quickly as U.Me does – it is available either as a podcast series, each episode being anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes long, or as a single 50-minute broadcast – requires that the romantic leads click straight away. They certainly do here, both with each other and with us, meaning we buy into the whirlwind escalation of their friendship, in a world where being a hemisphere apart is nothing in a world where leaving one’s doorstep has been a rare excursion.

That immediate sense of getting these characters, of being on their wavelength and understanding immediately that they are made for each other, is compounded by a series of songs by composer Theo Jamieson (who also co-writes the book with Simon Pitts) which feel lively, contemporary and immersive.

That’s due in part to Jamieson’s infectious melodies being performed by the BBC Philharmonic, an orchestra the size of which even the largest West End production can only dream. With many of the Philharmonic’s members performing from home in lockdown, the musical has enlisted the talents of record producer Steve Levine to produce a resonant soundscape for each number.

The resultant flirtation between Rose and Ryo is charming and lushly romantic, from the couple sharing their fears that their lives had yet to get going even before everything stopped, to dancing with chairs as stand-ins for dancing with each other.

But the last year has been more than just frustration over internet connections (such as in ‘Still Life’, a triple play on words about frozen on screen images, the sensation of nothing progressing and the acknowledgement that whatever happens in lockdown is, still, life). There has been tragedy too, and Jamieson and Pitts’ book faces that head on.

It is a mark of the show’s quality that, within the space of a few minutes, the elation of this young couple’s burgeoning romance can take a sharp turn into eulogy, an expression of the grief millions of the world have had to experience, so believably and effectively.

The speed of those emotional U-turns, and their effectiveness, is somewhat tempered in the podcast version, where the closing credits (read by the musical’s narrator, Stephen Fry) come crashing in so quickly after each episode’s closing bars that there is no room to catch one’s breath. Far better is the full broadcast version, in which the whole story is allowed to unfold – still at a rapid pace, but one in which one feels happily swept along.

The piece ends with questions between Rose and Ryo still unanswered, a sense that their stories are really just starting. We may never find out where their story is headed next, but its beginning is so lush and beautifully portrayed that one can listen to it over and over and not tire of it, instead revelling in one of the best musicals the radio form has yet produced.

Scott Matthewman