Opening with a song named Wanker, Rehab initially sounds like a musical setting out to shock, but it is actually written with a lot of heart. It draws on songwriter Grant Black’s own experience and is about a 90s singer, Kid Pop, who winds up in rehab after he’s papped snorting cocaine. Pop’s inevitable story of redemption feels contrived but the characters he meets, and the lively score that underpins their stories, are great fun, nuanced and full of compassion.
Wearing a union jack T-shirt and streaky eyeliner, Jonny Labey’s Kid Pop looks like all the 90s pop stars rolled into one. Labey is charming and cocky, with just a hint of vulnerability peeking through. There’s a particularly clever song, Lucy, in which his sexual fantasies are repeatedly interrupted by the other characters’ far stranger and funnier addictions (one guy, obsessed with sunbathing, rubs lustily up against a UV light). In the world of rehab, Kid Pop is no longer star of the show.
Phil Sealey gets all the best songs as cross-dresser Phil Newman. While the romance between Kid Pop and ex-stripper Lucy (Gloria Onitiri) tidily frames this musical, it’s Phil’s story that brings out the best in Black and co-composer and lyricist Murray Lachlan Young. Phil’s songs are impossibly tender (Ordinary Girl) but also absurdly light and funny (The Cheese Song) and hint at greater depths these writers could reach.
Alongside all of this is a fairly clunky subplot involving polymath performer Keith Allen, who plays scheming PR man Malcolm Stone. With a very silly blond wig and a very broad script from Elliot Davis, Stone is ultimately a figure of fun rather than a genuine menace. That’s a shame because with the right material, particularly Pinter, Allen can smoulder darkly with the best of them. Still, there’s something tickling about watching him storm about singing Everyone Loves Cocaine. Dated, yes, but cheekily entertaining all the same.
At the Playground theatre, London, until 17 September
