Kathy & Stella Solve a Murder! at Ambassadors Theatre review: a slapdash spoof of the true crime genre
Perhaps there is a God, I thought, as this oafish musical was cancelled due to an onstage flood halfway through its original press night.
But here it is again: a slapdash spoof of the true crime genre – and of the more sinister growth in amateur sleuthing – that knowingly asks you to laugh along with its ridiculous storyline, feckless lead characters and bland, belted-out score.
As the titular, dysfunctional best friends who host a weekly murder podcast from a garage near Hull, Bronté Barbé and Rebekah Hinds sell the songs and the broad jokes better than they deserve.
The whole thing has a rough and robust zest that doubtless helped it rise above the dross on the Edinburgh Fringe. But in the more rarefied atmosphere of the West End the constant barrage of gurning and caterwauling is a major turn-off.
The plot? Oh, all right then. Kathy and Stella hope true-crime queen Felicia Taylor (Hannah Jane Fox, wildly hammy), who made a fortune by supposedly identifying the “Hull Decapitator” serial killer, will boost them to stardom on her new podcast network.
But when she scorns them and is then murdered, they set out to solve the crime, much to the disgust of Detective Inspector Sue Shaw (a weary Elliotte Williams-N’Dure).
Naturally, we learn that these two bumbling losers share secret hidden anguish. Naturally, their friendship is tested but emerges stronger.
The targets are many and ripe with potential: the obsessiveness of the online world; the way it leads us to impose our own narratives on fact; our increasing imperviousness to horror; the presence of vicious criminals in the police. But it’s lazily executed, relying for laughs on comical Yorkshire accents, broad juxtapositions and kooky rhymes (Felicia Taylor/failure/inhaler for instance).
The acting is all wildly exaggerated, and volume utterly trumps nuance in the songs. Above all, it feels as if the story is being made up as the show goes along, in a vague attempt to link the arch, mundane, pop-rock numbers. The title of one of these, ‘F*ck! We Don’t Know What We’re Doing’, just about sums it up.
The book is by Jon Brittain, who co-wrote the lyrics with composer Matthew Floyd Jones, and also co-directs with choreographer Fabian Aloise (whose work here is startlingly amateurish compared to his routines for Sunset Blvd last year).
Designer Cecilia Carey supplies a functional set of backdrops and billboards and what appear to be deliberately horrible costumes: Barbé’s jittery Kathy is a sort of hippy clown with a ginger hairdon’t; Hind’s sardonic Stella an improbable goth in virulent eyeshadow and a denim ra-ra skirt.
The lead producer is Francesca Moody, here expending a great deal of the professional capital she earned from producing Fleabag. There’s clearly a market for this kind of self-ironising, aren’t-we-rubbish comedy (see also Gwyneth Goes Skiing), but Kathy and Stella left me dead inside.
Ambassador’s Theatre, to 14 Sept; kathyandstella.com
