One Man Musical was launched under a veil of discretion, with its creators anticipating it might not last a week. Six months on, after hit Edinburgh and Soho theatre runs, it has a six-week season in the heart of the West End. (Oh, and it was ranked the Guardian’s favourite comedy show of 2024 too.) You’d never guess from the coy title what a sensation this maiden musical-theatre offering from comedy duo Flo & Joan is becoming. But a sensation it is – and will remain, unless its subject, and his lawyers, lodge a belated demand that it cease and desist.
When Flo & Joan – AKA sisters Rosie and Nicola Dempsey – opened the show last summer, they were tight-lipped about which “one man” their musical referred to. But with its fringe success, the cat escaped its bag: the show traces the life story, in song and soliloquy, of the “king of the musicools” Andrew Lloyd Webber. Starring comedian and actor (and a recent Hamlet at Shakespeare’s Globe) George Fouracres, in what I’ll jump the gun and call the performance of a lifetime, it begins as a seeming satire on the career of a man often dismissed as a Thatcherite purveyor of crass mega-musicals. It then develops into something more acute: part-cartoon, part-psychologically rich portrait of an artist out of his time, raging against his vast distance from the zeitgeist.
