Hit Machine Review – Great musical drama hits a lot of wrong notes | stage

HeyOn paper, Jonathan Karen’s Whack Machine has all the makings of a major success. Featuring the London stage premiere of Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother) and Noah Galvin (Dear Evan Hansen), with direction from Danielle Bailey (Red Pitch) and music by Grammy Award-winning blues musician Ben Harper, the trio examines themes of masculinity, appropriation and buried familial trauma through the prism of the creative process.

Set in the softly furnished home of music mogul Wes (Radnor), the play begins promisingly. Wayward younger brother Alex (Galvin) arrives and drops a plaid-shirt bomb into Wes’s carefully manicured, simple life. We begin to see how each sibling plays their role in the tense family dynamic: Wes, the overachiever on the fun treadmill who’s always striving for more, and Alex, the lively, secretive young man just seeking approval.

Music is important, of course – it is the source of Wes’s success as a brand president but also the means through which the brothers bonded during their difficult childhood years – and its magic and immediacy is crafted into the world of the play. Armed with a keyboard and a laptop, the brothers tap a few keys like hackers in an early 2000s thriller, and suddenly the beats come to life.

The tone is largely local and rooted in Billy’s unpretentious direction. However, when Karen’s script starts injecting more drama, the engaging realism quickly falls apart. Galvin veers from playing Alex with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old to maniacal obsession, while Radnor shifts from father to hatred. The audience is given the reasons for these mood swings, but the solutions feel unique and straightforward, rather than delving into the messy and often contradictory complexity of childhood trauma.

Khalil Madoffi’s brief appearance as Wes’s new signing “Challenge the Commander” brings some much-needed intrigue, except that his discussion of the societal expectations placed on black men in the public eye once again touches on a fascinating subject without exploring its depths, relegating it to an afterthought.

Hit Machine is ultimately a show about music without much music at all – only one song is performed in its entirety – and it’s a script about topics of great importance that it’s too keen on resolving rather than allowing the drama to be properly felt and earned.