Review: SNAP: A NEW MUSICAL, King's Head Theatre

There’s something of the film Challengers in the pivotal scene of Snap, when an earnest male model and the lecherous photographer he’s working with end up in bed with each other’s partners, and all four actors anxiously sing their way through their tangled professional and personal lives. Thankfully, though, the plot of 2024’s much-discussed ‘tennis throuple’ film did not hinge almost entirely on a typo.

Said typo occurs in a text message, about a third of the way into David O’Brien’s new musical, and leads the aforementioned model Tom’s (Will Usherwood-Bliss) girlfriend Angela (Hayley Maybury) to believe he dumped her, and swear revenge – shenanigans ensue.

What’s more, Angela has her own history with photographer Max (Matteo Giambiasi), who in turn shares a troubling sexual dynamic with his assistant Sheila (Justine Marie Mead, who lends both tenacity and vulnerability to the script’s most emotionally complex role). And Tom, a former naked butler, seems to have a precarious employment situation.

If all this seems bizarre and thinly developed, that’s because it is. The book, also by O’Brien, raises more questions than it answers: why does the ambitious Angela put up with Tom, a loitering gamer at the start of the play? Why does prototypical Golden Retriever boyfriend Tom cheat, when he doesn’t have the typo as an excuse? How and why has the Svengali-esque Max been secretly pulling the strings the whole time?

We don’t learn nearly enough about the characters to provide convincing answers to these questions, or to why we should care – an early ‘I Want’ song where the quartet sing of their ambitions in relentless counterpoint feels unearned and unexplored.

Elsewhere, though, this is a musical that is carried by its music. Frenetic piano trills help paint Max as a manic genius (and perhaps explain things the spoken dialogue cannot), and O’Brien can handle both a witty patter song – Maybury as Angela is especially adept at descending into musical hysterics – and a slower, simpler melodic line for Tom and Angela’s heartfelt reconciliation. Sheila and Angela’s marvellously bitchy duet, where they realise the mutual infidelity and bond together in solidarity (with some underlying sexual tension between them as well), is another standout.

There’s also not a weak link in the cast vocally, and this is a fine showcase for their musical comedy skills. A particular highlight is Tom’s fateful photoshoot with Max, a Calvin Klein-style underwear ad that turns out, in fact, to be advertising tea, and the cast is unafraid to embrace the silly concept (even if some of the light-hearted references to sexual harassment on the shoot feel a little outdated).

That photoshoot scene is so well done that you wish there was more actual satire of the world of photography – it certainly has enough superficiality, ego, and compromising one-on-one situations to make it rife for partner-swapping drama. Other than the studio backdrop and some shutter sound effects, though, there’s no reason that this could not have been a musical about another art form, or even another profession entirely.

There’s something interesting here, and almost every possible configuration of the four characters contains a psychosexual dynamic worth exploring. But the script needs greater depth – and perhaps a wider lens – to truly land.

Snap runs at the King's Head Theatre until 25 May

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