This wildly fun show – which arrives in the West End after acclaimed runs in Edinburgh, Manchester and Bristol – ingeniously yokes the breathlessness of the true crime podcast genre to the big emotions of a musical. And with a huge wink at the audience, co-creators Jon Brittain and Matthew Floyd Jones give us some killer lyrics.
True crime afficionados Kathy (Bronté Barbé) and Stella (Rebekah Hinds) live in Hull. They’ve been best friends since school. Kathy’s been back home for eight years after dropping out of university after having a breakdown; Stella’s living on her sister’s couch. They escape from their lives by recording a murder podcast in Kathy’s mum’s basement, discussing the lurid cases they find on Wikipedia.
One day, the author Felicia Taylor (Hannah-Jane Fox) – Kathy and Stella’s true-crime idol –comes to town… only to be murdered shortly after the pair meet her at a book-signing event. The killing was in the style of the ‘Hull Decapitator’, whose identity Taylor sensationally claimed to have cracked decades ago. The duo are delighted: they’re now part of the story. They decide to turn detective and solve the mystery of Taylor’s killer.
Brittain, together with the show’s co-director and choreographer Fabian Aloise, gives us a blaze of colour and inventive set-pieces. These whirl deliciously through the various visual cliches of potboiler detective fiction as filtered through loving parodies of Big Musical Moments. This is reflected in the whip-sharp book and lyrics, in which Brittain and Floyd also give us an affectionately wry snapshot of the clamour of internet-era fandom.
Beneath the stupidly catchy songs, which move effortlessly through differing genres, this is a story about two people navigating a friendship through change. Thankfully, though, it’s far more light on its feet than that sounds. That’s significantly due to the chemistry and exceptional comic timing shared between Barbé and Hinds, which anchors the story’s convolutions. With hilarious double-takes firmly rooted in character, Kathy and Stella pop off the stage.
The rest of the ensemble cast are a blast. Fox eats up the theatre as deliciously awful celebrity author Taylor (RIP) and her extremely similar-looking siblings. ‘Unhinged’ barely describes Imelda Warren-Green as Stella and Kathy superfan Erica, while Elliotte Williams-N’Dure is Detective Inspector Sue Shaw, exasperated by this pair of amateur sleuths who’ve watched too much ‘Line of Duty’.
As cleverly as the show handles the sheer amount of plotting and suspects inherent in a murder mystery, the deceptively disciplined union of story and music that makes the first half such a joy good gets baggier after the interval. The propulsive energy slightly dissipates. But this production deserves to be a hit. Never less than abundantly creative, funny and musically dextrous, Kathy and Stella's exploits will absolutely slay you.
