This isn’t the first musical set somewhere in the United States to feature a car on stage – one thinks of Sunset Boulevard (even if the most recent West End and Broadway iteration appeared to feature nothing at all), Bonnie & Clyde, and, to a lesser extent, Ragtime. I don’t think I’ve come across one that takes leaving school and learning to drive as linchpins in a coming-of-age story before – the central character, Samantha (Dora Gee), making love for the first time to her boyfriend Adam (Gabriel Hinchliffe) is a somewhat secondary matter.
Samantha – or Sam to her bestie Kelly (Courtney Stapleton), and indeed to Adam – has not, despite the show’s title, been diagnosed with mental illness, and neither has any other character in the show. Neither is anyone particularly angry about anything: the closest to infuriation is Sam expressing frustration over conflicting opinions from the others, when what she really needs is time and space to figure out what she should do next. The world is her oyster, she has her whole life ahead of her, and so on and so forth, and while she isn’t crystal clear on her life goals, she does at least know what she doesn’t want, namely to fall into line with her mother Beverly’s (Thea-Jo Wolfe) plans for her. But then, doesn’t almost every youngster want to go against what their parents want?
The show’s title, then, comes from what Sam and Kelly call themselves – ‘mad ones’, in the sense that they have decided to throw caution to the wind. Not everyone will agree with them – after all, there is nothing inherently ‘mad’ about wanting to live one’s best life. The show’s previous title was The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown, which is more cumbersome, but personally I prefer it. Anyway, much laughter comes at Sam’s expense from the other characters when it transpires she has failed her driving test four times. At least she can get a test, and another, and another, which is more than can be said for a considerable number of learner drivers in Britain at the time of writing.
Both Sam and Kelly’s singing voices are in fine form – in The Other Palace’s studio space, they could have been too overpowering, especially when the score takes them into big and long notes, held for several seconds, so beloved by musical theatre. But Gee and Stapleton know what they are doing, and the end result is a sound nothing short of sublime. The show’s critical incident has already happened by the time the show starts (with the benefit of hindsight, the stage’s backdrop was a massive giveaway), so Sam is living in the aftermath of it.
There’s much to identify with, at least because the show’s themes of loss and bereavement, love (of both the familial and relationship kinds) and getting on with life and moving on, are borderline universal. The songs and spoken word elements are so intricately linked that they blend into one another: there is seldom, apart from at the end of each half, an appropriate moment to pause and applaud, which is unusual for a musical. But this is not a show that needs frequent revalidation – confident in its narrative arc, the whole show soars, with very believable characters. Thinking about it, why is there an interval? It breaks the momentum unnecessarily – at two hours including interval, one hour forty minutes without one, for a show as engaging as this, is not too much to ask.
Mum (or should that be Mom?) Beverly really does want the best for Sam, and while she might be overbearing (I found her ‘do these things or you will crash and die’ approach to driving instruction strangely amusing) this production is never too preachy about the dangers of excessive control and influence and how it can, unchecked, achieve the opposite of what the parent is trying to achieve. As for Sam, her supposed indecisiveness is perhaps a maturer approach than the sort of teenager who wants to be an astronaut one day and a consultant gynaecologist the next. It was also good to hear ‘Run Away With Me’, so often heard at musical theatre concerts, in context: no spoilers, of course, suffice to say it all made sense at long last. A charming journey that calls its audiences to consider what really matters in life, it’s sweet but not saccharine, multilayered but not overly complex. As a fellow reviewer would put it, ‘Highly recommended!’
Review by Chris Omaweng
Mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…
18-year-old Samantha Brown sits in a hand-me-down car with the keys clutched in her hand. Caught between a yearning for the unknown and feeling bound by expectation, she telescopes back to a time before her world had fallen apart. As she relives her senior year, we meet Sam’s well-intentioned helicopter mother, Bev, and her high school sweetheart of a boyfriend, Adam, but it’s her painfully alive best friend, Kelly, who haunts her. Kelly was everything Sam is not—impetuous and daring. She pushed Sam to break rules and do the unexpected. When Kelly is killed in a car wreck, Sam loses not only her best friend but also the part of herself that was learning to be brave. Now, Sam has to make a decision: will she follow her mother’s dreams for her, or will she summon the courage to drive away from her friends and family into a future she can’t imagine?
CAST
Dora Gee as Samantha Brown
Gabriel Hinchliffe as Adam
Courtney Stapleton as Kelly
Thea-Jo Wolfe as Beverly
Eliza Bowden as Swing
CREATIVES
Writers: Kait Kerrigan & Bree Lowdermilk
Director: Emily Susanne Lloyd
Musical Director: Callum Thompson
Choreographer: Lauren Stroud
Set & Costume Designer: Reuben Speed
Lighting Designer: Joanne Marshall
Sound Designer: Tom Bedworth
Producer: Samantha Creswick
Creative Producer: James Edge
License: Concord (Andy Chan)
THE MAD ONES
The Other Palace Studio, 12 Palace Street, London SW1E 5JA
7 May to 1 June 2025
