Rosie: A New Musical (Adelphi Theatre)

Review by Lily Melhuish

⭐️

After more than a decade in development, ROSIE arrived in the West End for a one-night-only, semi-staged gala at the Adelphi theatre. The surrounding narrative has momentum: a studio cast album released in 2024, millions of streams, award recognition, and now a high-profile London outing. Yet the performance suggests a project still uncertain about the most basic question it needs to answer: what makes this a story worth telling?

In broad outline, the musical dramatises the life of Rosie Boote, a woman raised in an Irish convent and later propelled into Edwardian theatreland as a Gaiety Girl in the early 1900s. It promises passion, scandal and determination despite all odds. The problem is, the finished product has no odds to wrestle with. ROSIE is a curiously frictionless tale that continually gestures toward adversity, only to neutralise it before it can generate dramatic consequence.

Rosie’s father dies when she is young; her mother gives her up; she is raised in a convent. These facts should provide a foundation for some kind of psychological complexity, but the writing treats them primarily as narrative facts to be ticked off. The convent is depicted as stern but steady, and Rosie carries Catholic values into her adult life. When she arrives in London, her bag is stolen, but even this hint of jeopardy is immediately smoothed away when Lily “Lil” Turner appears and takes Rosie under her wing. Lil introduces Rosie to theatre manager George Edwardes, Rosie auditions, Rosie sings impressively, Rosie is hired. In short succession, everything works out.

That pattern continues once romance is introduced. Rosie meets Geoffrey Taylour, Marquis of Headfort, and the narrative pivots from professional ambition to the prospect of a mixed-class marriage. Society’s disapproval is repeatedly announced - Geoffrey’s mother bristles, local opinion turns - yet the musical refuses to allow this opposition to exert pressure. There is no meaningful risk, no sustained conflict, and therefore no dramatic suspense.

The result is not simply that the story feels safe, but unfortunately, dull. It becomes dramatically void: a succession of scenes that reiterate outcomes rather than generate them. Rosie is written as consistently agreeable, competent and admirable, as if worried that mess might stain the heroine’s image. What might have once been a complicated, inspiring life has been sanded down into a glossy fable.

Chris Broom’s score often aims for uplift through soaring melody and emotional sweep. Individual numbers are powerful, polished, and well-suited to the voice singing them, but they are repeatedly deployed at the same emotional altitude. Many lyrics hover in the realm of vague aspiration (“lift me above the clouds”, “we can change the world”), offering generalised emotion instead of character-specific desire. The evening becomes dominated by what feel like variations on the power ballad, with limited rhythmic or tonal contrast. A lively overture hints at range, but the score that follows tends toward stagnation.

Young Rosie gets an early sombre solo that feels like a musical-theatre rite of passage (think Oliver’s “Where is Love?”) in its weaponising of orphaned child misfortune. It’s sweet, if a bit stale. Like a Garibaldi biscuit that’s been left at the back of the cupboard. Adult Rosie’s first Gaiety Girl number gives us the evening’s closest thing to musical comedy, but even that lands as merely pleasant. There’s never a real suggestion she might fail, make a mistake, or be undone by nerves, so the scene floats by in a forgettable blur. 

The ensemble numbers often function as musical signposts: We are in the West End! We are at a restaurant! We are at a ball! Thank you, duly noted. In a fully staged version you’d likely grasp that through design and direction, which raises the question: why are these songs here at all? The one point where the chorus gains traction is Act 2’s “An Absolute Disgrace”, in which townsfolk gossip about Rosie and Geoffrey’s engagement with gleeful disapproval. Here, at last, the musical recognises what the ensemble can do: articulate social pressure, build a cultural context, and provide the judgemental backdrop against which personal decisions acquire meaning. But because the show so rarely permits social hostility to have consequences, even this burst of vitality arrives as a tease rather than a turning point.

ROSIE’s central issue is the book. It operates with an unusual level of narrative reassurance: characters explain their feelings, repeat information, and signpost developments in a manner that leaves little room for subtext or discovery. The musical wants to frame Rosie’s story as courageous and transgressive, yet it dramatises a world that seems eager to accommodate her. A theme around class, the supposed unsuitability of an actress for aristocratic marriage, is introduced, but the writing does not convincingly dramatise what the cost of that transgression might be. It creates the strange sensation of watching an action film on Netflix that’s been made for people who are also scrolling their phones, except there are no car chases or explosions. Frankly, I wouldn’t have said no to a small pyrotechnic event.

The cast deliver the score with notable vocal control. Lucy Thomas sings the central role with assurance and clarity, and the semi-staged format inevitably foregrounds that strength: this is a show built around the pleasures of sustained vocal display. Sally Ann Triplett as Lady Edith (Geoffrey’s mother) injects welcome zing, embodying the protective, disapproving matriarch archetype with enough sharpness to earn a few titters. Elsewhere, the performances are often boxed into one-note sincerity because the script doesn’t permit an arc.

It is tempting to frame ROSIE as a piece that simply needs a sharper book or more adventurous staging, but I’m not convinced a fully staged version would solve the core issue: a drama-free story told at maximum emotional volume. In musical theatre, emotion typically becomes song at moments of pressure: when language fails, when desire collides with reality, when a decision must be made. Here, songs fill time rather than transform it.

So: it’s a boot for Rosie Boote. Not out of malice, but more a gentle nudge towards the rewrite room, with a hope that the next iteration finds the scandal, the contemporary resonance, and the theatrical mischief this “thrilling tale” keeps promising.

Photos by Danny Kaan