Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A few years ago Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss blazed on to the musical theatre stage with their wildly improbable — and hugely successful — Six, in which the wives of Henry VIII formed an impromptu girl-band to challenge history with a blast of “her-story”. They’re still strutting their Tudor style all over the world.But success brings its own headaches — not least the challenge of the next project. One of the charms of Moss and Marlow’s Why Am I So Single? is that it confronts that issue head-on. With a lot of fourth-wall-breaking and metatheatrical mischief, they make their new “big fancy musical” about two best-friend-writers (played with fabulous charisma by Jo Foster and Leesa Tulley) supposedly penning a West End show, but in fact spending the evening raking through their unwanted single status. Instead of delivering high-stakes drama and big swoony duets, they end up scrolling through dating apps, watching Friends yet again and working their way through a fair amount of prosecco.It’s wickedly self-referential and completely daft — there’s a standout number about the trauma of getting a bee out of your flat, for goodness’ sake. It really shouldn’t work. But it does — dazzlingly so. Why? Because it’s frank, funny, wittily self-deprecating — “You don’t think it’s a bit lazy and forced?” asks one character — packed with dizzying musical parody, and, above all, because at its heart is a tender and sincere celebration of friendship.As with Six, we’re back with relationship problems — although losing your head over a bad date isn’t quite the same as actually losing your head. Here, as friends Nancy and Oliver (favourite musical: Oliver!, who knew?) analyse their lack of romantic success, the show unpacks the multiple hazards of the dating-app age — as particular in their agony as the ball-going perils of Jane Austen’s time.So we have “8 Dates”, whisking us through brutal last-minute cancellations, and “Meet Market”, satirising the transactional nature of online dating, with potential partners hurtling around the stage pushing shopping trolleys. Perhaps smartest of all is “C U Never”, in which Ellen Kane’s exuberant choreography matches tap routines to the tip-tap sounds of texting. The whole thing has a breezy, bonkers late-night Fringe quality, underpinned by playful design from Moi Tran (set) and Max Johns (costumes). In Moss’s production even the furniture (played by the company) gets in on the act, with the cheese plant upstaging everyone by entering too early. But streaking through it is something sadder: a soaring solo from Tulley’s Nancy reveals that she is still grieving her ex and the loss of her father; a striking number from Foster’s Oliver demonstrates how he/they (the character is non-binary) hides insecurity beneath a bubbly facade. It’s in fronting up to these issues that they realise what they have in each other.It’s a long joke, frantic in places, and the extra framing of the prologue and epilogue feels unnecessary. But the show has so much effervescent joy, and is delivered with such energy and heart by Foster, Tulley and the terrific ensemble, that it’s irresistible. And, in the end, under cover of obsession with romantic love, it smuggles in a refreshing musical paean to platonic love.★★★★☆To February 13, whyamisosingle.com
