Opening with a track named Wanker, Rehab initially seems like a musical getting down to shock, however it's really written with quite a lot of coronary heart. It attracts on songwriter Grant Black’s personal expertise and is a few 90s singer, Child Pop, who winds up in rehab after he’s papped snorting cocaine. Pop’s inevitable story of redemption feels contrived however the characters he meets, and the vigorous rating that underpins their tales, are nice enjoyable, nuanced and stuffed with compassion.
Sporting a union jack T-shirt and streaky eyeliner, Jonny Labey’s Child Pop appears like all of the 90s pop stars rolled into one. Labey is charming and cocky, with only a trace of vulnerability peeking by. There’s a very intelligent track, Lucy, by which his sexual fantasies are repeatedly interrupted by the opposite characters’ far stranger and funnier addictions (one man, obsessive about sunbathing, rubs lustily up towards a UV mild). On the earth of rehab, Child Pop is not star of the present.
Phil Sealey will get all one of the best songs as cross-dresser Phil Newman. Whereas the romance between Child Pop and ex-stripper Lucy (Gloria Onitiri) tidily frames this musical, it’s Phil’s story that brings out one of the best in Black and co-composer and lyricist Murray Lachlan Younger. Phil’s songs are impossibly tender (Bizarre Lady) but additionally absurdly mild and humorous (The Cheese Tune) and trace at higher depths these writers might attain.
Alongside all of this can be a pretty clunky subplot involving polymath performer Keith Allen, who performs scheming PR man Malcolm Stone. With a really foolish blond wig and a really broad script from Elliot Davis, Stone is in the end a determine of enjoyable somewhat than a real menace. That’s a disgrace as a result of with the best materials, notably Pinter, Allen can smoulder darkly with one of the best of them. Nonetheless, there’s one thing tickling about watching him storm about singing Everybody Loves Cocaine. Dated, sure, however cheekily entertaining all the identical.
On the Playground theatre, London, till 17 September
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