Review: Sugar Daddy (Underbelly Boulevard)

Review by Matthew Plampton

⭐️⭐️⭐️

How do you turn heartbreaking grief into a comedy? And will it help you to grieve? These are the questions that sit at the heart of Sugar Daddy, Sam Morrison's acclaimed solo show, now playing at the Underbelly Boulevard in Soho following sold-out runs in Edinburgh, New York, and London. Co-produced by Alan Cumming and Billy Porter, and directed by Amrou Al-Kadhi, this newly staged version arrives with considerable pedigree. But can comedy and grief truly coexist, or does one inevitably diminish the impact of the other?

One summer in Provincetown, the queer haven on the tip of Cape Cod, Morrison met and fell in love with Jonathan, an older man, his "silver zaddy", as Morrison puts it. Their romance blossomed during Bear Week, against the backdrop of the tight-knit Provincetown community, a place Morrison evokes with such lived-in affection that the audience is transported. But the pandemic intervened, and Jonathan was devastatingly taken by COVID. Left isolated and consumed with loneliness, Morrison turned to the only tool at his disposal: comedy. It is a love story, first and foremost, and when Morrison allows himself to dwell in that love, the show is poignantly impactful.

What makes Sugar Daddy stand out is its refusal to settle into a single tone. The show pivots between outrageous comedy and moments of genuine poignancy, sometimes with great fluency, and at other times to the piece’s detriment. Morrison is a gifted joke writer, and his one-liners land with satisfying precision: anecdotes about unlikely encounters and absurd run-ins are threaded through the narrative with expert timing. When he tells us that "what is trauma but un-monetised content?", it draws one of the biggest laughs of the evening, but there is a needle of truth in it that lingers well beyond the punchline.

Morrison never allows the pace to slacken, building momentum through a series of escalating stories that circle outward from his central love story to take in his subsequent diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes, his reflections on the bear community and body image, and a broader meditation on how grief reshapes a person. Morrison is bluntly candid on the subject of bodies and desire, and that candour runs right through Sugar Daddy, lending the show an honesty that cuts through the gags. There is a particularly affecting passage in which he evokes Provincetown’s history as a sanctuary for those living through the AIDS crisis, connecting Jonathan's story to a longer lineage of queer loss and resilience. It is deftly handled, never preachy, always personal, and it gives the show an emotional weight that extends far beyond one man's story.

Morrison has a natural ease with an audience, a knack for reading the room and adjusting accordingly, and his willingness to be vulnerable is powerful. There are, too, some genuinely beautiful moments of warmth and emotion here. When Morrison speaks of feeling safe with his partner, or when he draws the devastating connection between Jonathan and his diabetes, the idea that Jonathan is, quite literally, still part of him, the show reaches a depth of feeling that is quietly heartfelt. These are the moments when Sugar Daddy is at its most powerful, and when Morrison's gifts as a storyteller are most fully on display. It is in these passages that we glimpse what the show could be: a profound story of queer love, on finding someone who makes you feel whole, and on carrying that person with you after they are gone.

And yet, it is precisely because those moments are so affecting that the show's central tension becomes a frustration as much as a strength. Too often, just as we are about to sit with something tender, to really delve into the grief or the beauty of what Morrison and Jonathan shared, the narrative jumps to another thought entirely, a tangent, a throwaway observation, and then a joke arrives to diffuse whatever emotional depth might have accumulated. The structure feels restless, almost anxious, never allowing the audience to truly sit with a moment before being whisked away to the next. You cannot help but wonder whether this is intentional, a reflection of how, too often in the queer community, humour is deployed as a defence mechanism, a way of deflecting rather than truly sitting with discomfort and pain. If so, it is a sharp observation, and Morrison is certainly self-aware enough to be making it knowingly. But as a piece of theatre, it left me wanting more.

The more significant issue, however, is what fills that deflective space. Morrison leans heavily on a particular well of material: the apps, the parties, the drugs, the self-destructive hedonism. In doing so, the show risks reducing the richness of gay culture to a Grindr stereotype, a world defined entirely by shallow hookups and chemical excess. This is a show about a man who found profound, transformative love, who built a life with someone, who was held and seen and cherished. Yet we spend more time on the clichés of gay toxicity than on the extraordinary tenderness at the show's heart. It feels like a missed opportunity, and, more than that, it undersells the very beautiful love story Morrison is trying to tell. Gay men are capable of, and deserving of, the same depth of romantic love as anyone else, and Jonathan clearly gave Morrison exactly that. Why, then, does the show too often retreat to the shallowest version of queer experience?

These reservations keep Sugar Daddy from reaching the heights it is clearly capable of. Morrison is undeniably very funny, and when the show trusts its emotional core, when it sits in the love and the loss rather than deflecting into tired tropes, it is genuinely moving. But the tender moments are too often sacrificed to material that reinforces the very stereotypes queer communities have spent decades pushing back against. The result is a piece that entertains generously but ultimately sells short both its subject and its audience. Morrison had something beautiful with Jonathan, and I wish we had got to hear more about that. 

Sugar Daddy plays at Underbelly Boulevard until 4th April. Tickets from https://allthatdazzles.londontheatredirect.com/play/sugar-daddy-tickets

Photos by Mark Senior