Review: The Mad Ones (The Other Palace)

Review by Harry Bower

⭐️⭐️⭐️

New musicals don’t always immediately find their feet with an audience. So when The Mad Ones began to gain a cult following staged concerts and a 2020 cast album, people began to take note. And why wouldn’t they, with songwriting heritage behind the pages of music in Kait Kerrigan and Bree Lowdermilk? Now, a full production of the show comes to London for the first time, and the hype is palpable. But is it a blissful sun soaked drive down the freeway? Or does the translation from concert to stage get stuck in traffic?

An American teenager lies to an overbearing parent about something big, there’s the ghost of a deceased peer, metaphors about ‘turning the key’, short and sharp piano interludes between revelations... no, this isn’t a Dear Evan Hansen reboot. In fact, the original version of The Mad Ones (titled ‘The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown’) was produced before the former was written. This is a story of two college-bound best friends on the cusp of adulthood. Or at least, they were. Until one of them gets hit by a car outside the library. End of act one.

Telling you that isn’t a spoiler - it’s obvious from the first moment we meet our characters, and from that moment on we’re in the world of teenage angst, willing on protagonist Samantha as she attempts to process her grief and grapple with her identity. Performed in the tight confines of the Studio space, the staging is efficient and impressively layered. A handful of props and some evocative lighting do just enough to conjure the shifting timelines and emotional terrain. The occasional audible cue-board click from the lighting desk is oddly charming—very fringe, in the best way.

Performances vary, with some strong vocal talent, though uneven acting in parts occasionally pulls us out of the moment. Dora Gee’s Samantha Brown is on stage for more or less the entire production, not that you can tell by any drop in commitment. She is consistently believable and lovable - though it has to be said the rollercoaster of emotions her character experiences must be a real challenge to represent in such quick succession. Gee is pulling it off with bells on, though. Courtney Stapleton as Kelly is similarly challenged, and does a spectacular job at belting out what must be a record number of vocal sustains in one production. Stapleton is a star in the making and has something special on-stage which draws your eye to them in every scene. Gabriel Hinchliffe and Thea Jo Wolfe round off this four-hander, both landing some much needed laughter with solid comic timing and suitably exaggerated character quirks.

The book has moments of real strength, with well-paced dialogue, occasional sparks of humour, and a strong grasp on what makes its characters tick, especially in its more subtle and introspective scenes. Unfortunately, the music doesn’t always keep up. While emotionally charged and sometimes painfully earnest, the score struggles to settle on a musical identity. There’s a lot of belting, not a huge amount of melody, and one particularly jarring dubstep section that feels like it wandered in from another show entirely. Only a couple of numbers really stand out to me in the context of the full production, which is surprising given the popularity of the cast album. 

It feels like the performance is shoe-horning its narrative around finished tracks which have a definite starting point but no definitive end, which is sometimes jarring. With no stopping for applause at all in the entire show, I felt a sense of exhaustion watching it. No doubt the cast do an incredible job of keeping up, but vocal cords must be shredded after a few nights in a row. 

Narratively, it’s a bit of a head-spinner. We race back and forth through time with no clear road signs indicating what’s happening, making it difficult to fully anchor ourselves emotionally. At its best, this adds to the disorientation of teenage grief. At its worst, it feels like the story is constantly scrambling to keep up with its own momentum. Characters narrate, then drop out. Scenes bleed into songs before they’ve landed. The tone veers from confessional to dramatic and cliche, to oddly upbeat, often within the same sequence. 

I simply have to mention the wall-phone, constantly highlighted throughout the show, ringing and waiting to be answered. The implication is that an important call arrives via this phone, when in reality, Samantha uses her mobile phone to receive the life-changing news. Folk might say I’m focusing on an irrelevance, but herein lies one big problem with this production. There are layers of metaphor everywhere, and it is trying to do and say a lot. Inherently this means some things will go over the audience’s heads, and I genuinely can’t work out if the phone was a metaphor or a mistake.

Thematically, too, it’s a crowded field—grief, maternal pressure, queerness, friendship, teenage angst and relationship struggle, academic expectation, the fragility of youth. All rich veins, but rarely mined in depth. The queer storyline in particular is handled so subtly that it barely registers, relegated to a slightly confusing emotional beat in the show’s closing moments. And by the time hope finally peeks through, just minutes before the curtain, it feels too late in the day.

Still, there’s potential here. I write all of this constructive feedback because at its core it feels as though there is an important story worth telling. Samantha represents so much about our current world which is worthy of exploration. The themes of self-love and acceptance, of taking an uneven or less well-trodden path in life, defying societal norms, growing up and finding who you are; it’s all good stuff, but is told in such a messy way. Particularly in act two.

The Mad Ones clearly began its life as a concert piece, and this feels like a necessary stepping-stone between page and polished production. With a larger stage, some proper choreography (which I found noticeably but understandably lacking given space requirements), and some aggressive editing, this story could be told in a much more affecting way. It needs more focus. Brevity. Hope. And ideally no more unanswered phone calls from inexplicably mobile-phone-connected wall units.

The Mad Ones plays at The Other Palace Studio until Sunday 01 June 2025. For more information visit: https://theotherpalace.co.uk/the-mad-ones/ 

Photos by @PerroLocoPro