Opening with a song named Wanker, Rehab initially sounds like a musical setting out to shock, but it is actually written with a lot of heart. It draws on songwriter Grant Black’s own experience and is about a 90s singer, Kid Pop, who winds up in rehab after he’s papped snorting cocaine. Pop’s inevitable story of redemption feels contrived but the characters he meets, and the lively score that underpins their stories, are great fun, nuanced and full of compassion.
Wearing a union jack T-shirt and streaky eyeliner, Jonny Labey’s Kid Pop looks like all the 90s pop stars rolled into one. Labey is charming and cocky, with just a hint of vulnerability peeking through. There’s a particularly clever song, Lucy, in which his sexual fantasies are repeatedly interrupted by the other characters’ far stranger and funnier addictions (one guy, obsessed with sunbathing, rubs lustily up against a UV light). In the world of rehab, Kid Pop is no longer star of the show.
