![\"Sam](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/96af0ec3709bdca7bccdaff845d4735d56-twostrangers.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Sam Tutty and Christiani Pitts in Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).
\n Photo: Matthew Murphy\n <\/p>\n
A good survey of the attenuated state of stage musicals these days might start by noting that there are only two new ones on Broadway this fall, and that, in subject and presentation, they lie at opposite ends of a vast socioeconomic divide. To get anywhere in this town lately, one must be either too large or too small to fail. Over at the St. James Theatre, The Queen of Versailles, a luxe spectacle with a giant staircase to prove it, finds its justification and cash flow through its deployment of star, Kristin Chenoweth. (Never mind that its addiction to gilt is part of why it isn\u2019t any good<\/a>.) A few blocks uptown at the Longacre, you\u2019ll find the anonymous characters of Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), who are making do with incomes far beneath the Versailles level\u2014one has arrived in the city for a wedding with about $60 in cash\u2014in a show whose tiny scale clearly reduced the financial risk of producing it. The stars Sam Tutty and Christiani Pitts are both charming musical theater actors, but neither is well-known, and your Playbill will remind you that this is the first musical by its British creators, Jim Barne and Kit Buchan. There\u2019s a little fan momentum behind the show\u2014Two Strangers premiered in London before doing a tryout in Boston\u2014but it\u2019s no Harry Potter. The show plays out on a single rotating set, designed by Soutra Gilmour, amid a collection of what appears to be abandoned luggage at a baggage claim that stands in for a variety of New York City locales.<\/p>\n Smallness, mind you, can be a great thing in a musical. With sharp enough eyes and ears, creative teams can unveil a richness of texture in confined emotional and visual terrain\u2014the exquisite carved miniature of The Band\u2019s Visit, which Buchan and Barne have cited as inspiration<\/a> for Two Strangers, being a prime example. Two Strangers does so by looking closely at the lives of a pair of relatively ordinary people: A British man, Dougal (played by Tutty), has come to town for his father\u2019s wedding to the sister of an American named Robin (played by Pitts). Dougal and Robin are bound by circumstance but opposite in nature\u2014he\u2019s a wide-eyed optimist who wants to see every landmark, she\u2019s a hardened New Yorker who\u2019s over it all\u2014and they bicker their way across the city running an errand while growing closer. The day before the ceremony, Robin\u2019s sister demands that she pick up the wedding cake from a bakery in Brooklyn; Dougal, who\u2019s being pointedly ignored by his father, is happy to glom onto her cross-borough adventure. Barne and Buchan\u2019s premise pulls on shades of Before Sunrise, with more than a little of the corniness of a Hallmark Christmas movie, but they wisely resist a too-neat conclusion. We never see any other character onstage\u2014and only briefly hear the voices of some\u2014but the sense that there are people who are always \u201cmore important\u201d than our protagonists lingers over the story nicely, whether those are the family members involved in the wedding or simply other New Yorkers who have the family money or successful careers that give them access to the metal-plated credit cards Dougal and Robin wish they could use to swipe their way through the city with ease.<\/p>\n If you could praise a musical based on its pitch alone, Two Strangers would have it all bound up. In execution, however, this cake isn\u2019t fully baked. Barne and Buchan\u2019s contemporary-pop score lacks distinctiveness, and it treads closely in the footsteps of other musical theater\u2014there\u2019s more than one ballad that you could convince me was a draft that Pasek and Paul<\/a> discarded. Whereas a close attention to character makes for good storytelling, it\u2019s an exacting standard to live up to in writing. Early in act one, Barne and Buchan have Dougal sailing along the train from JFK to Manhattan singing an ode to \u201cNew York\u201d<\/a> that\u2019s meant to be intentionally na\u00efve\u2014he imagines \u201cpizza for breakfast\u201d\u2014but it crosses the line into sloppy when, in the chorus, they search for a rhyme and have Dougal announce that in New York, he\u2019s \u201calready popping the cork.\u201d (A trite image made worse by the fact that Charley Kringas, in Stephen Sondheim\u2019s Merrily We Roll Along, proposes the same rhyme, then mutters, \u201cI\u2019ll fix that line.\u201d<\/a>) Rough phrasing can be powered through on an ATV of anthemic feeling\u2014thus the career of Tim Rice<\/a>\u2014but Barne and Buchan are aiming to find depth in the small, and every lyrical imprecision destabilizes the whole.<\/p>\n The two are generally more comfortable writing for Dougal, a grating and overenthusiastic rosy-cheeked British bloke whom Tutty brings to life with Energizer levels of mama\u2019s boy energy. A woman sitting near me asked her friend if she could \u201csteal him for myself,\u201d which is both unsettling and captures the spell Tutty casts over an audience. But the British-and-male creative team gets lost writing for Robin, a Black woman from Flatbush. While it makes sense for Dougal to sing New York clich\u00e9s, you\u2019d hope she\u2019d have something more specific to say about her neighborhood than that it\u2019s where you can get \u201cten-dollar shoes, fake nails, a broken record player, Cuban quesadillas, and weed,\u201d or \u201cwhere you can come and watch the city on Saturday nights.\u201d (I asked my colleagues at Grub Street<\/a> and no one could explain what a Cuban quesadilla is, and isn\u2019t Flatbush too low-lying to see the Manhattan skyline?) She also tells us that she likes to go to the Brooklyn Public Library. (If she means the central branch, that\u2019s on the other side of the park.) I\u2019m picking nits, sure, but a two-hander lives and dies on its focus. Pitts brings an intriguing sense of frustrated ambition and disappointment to Robin in her performance, and that enriches the character, but there\u2019s only so much she can find in the text. She\u2019s trying to look through a microscope while someone knocks it around with oven mitts.<\/p>\n The venue itself may be in part to blame here. In a smaller theater, without the pressure to live up to the standard of a Big Broadway Musical, Two Strangers would most likely look like an exciting work from promising new writers. For its staging at the Longacre, with an unnecessary intermission that slams the brakes on the action, the director Tim Jackson has slathered the thing in the icing of sentiment and popped his cork (I\u2019ll fix that later) trying to make a small story feel bigger. Gilmour\u2019s set, that pile of versatile luggage, has the right idea of allowing us in the audience to imagine the magical city the show\u2019s characters keep describing without ruining it with the literalism of giant 30 Rockefeller Plaza setpieces or, worse, a huge screen. But there\u2019s a visible and anxious need to layer crowdpleasing gestures on top of that simplicity: Near the end of the musical, a deluge of fake snow falls over a scene, overegging the intended romantic melancholy. Trust in your performers! Let the audience come to them.<\/p>\n When Two Strangers does do that, it does achieve something magical, and those moments make you see what a smaller-scale musical can do successfully without a huge budget or soapy showmanship. In the show\u2019s more reflective second act, we get more detail about Dougal and Robins\u2019s backstories, and Barne and Buchan do their best work. \u201cHe Doesn\u2019t Exist,\u201d a number sung by Robin\u2014Pitts attacks it with a just-right heartbreak\u2014is about the shared pain of an absent father, with fairy-tale imagery that syncs with the way a child is taught to fantasize, undercut by the adult realization indicated by the song\u2019s title. As you grow, you do the hard work of parting with the vision of the world you had in your head. That\u2019s a dynamic repeated throughout Two Strangers. Dougal is learning to give up both his idealized image of a foreign city and the relationship with his father he thinks he could re-ignite during this trip, and Robin learns to abandon the myth she\u2019s telling herself about her own failure. When the show\u2019s creators zero in on those feelings, something a lot more specific and wistful than a love story between two strangers, the piece comes alive. If only it stayed there.<\/p>\n Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) is at the Longacre Theatre.<\/p>\n Sign up for The Critics<\/p>\n A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n