Table 17 review – a tasty romcom served with dazzle and cheek

13 hours ago 1

This incorrigibly likable romcom comes to the UK with a bid of sold retired runs successful New York and Los Angeles successful its wake. You tin spot why: it slips down arsenic easy and pleasantly arsenic an old-school, Saturday-night TV meet-cute. Except writer Douglas Lyons’ communicative is simply a meet-again-cute due to the fact that the mates astatine its centre are exes.

It has been respective years since aerial steward Jada (Marisha Wallace) and aspiring euphony shaper Dallas (Jamael Westman) felt the sting of each other’s betrayals. Now they are sitting astatine array 17 to hash retired unfinished concern – and possibly relight the fire?

We archetypal conscionable them moments earlier the nervy reunion. What plays retired is sparky fun, spanning the couple’s past successful a akin mode to Nick Payne’s Constellations, sliding from contiguous to past and back.

Its ambition to treble up arsenic a superior narration play is not ever met due to the fact that of the imbalance of cutesy humour. The play treads akin crushed to specified precocious palmy romanticist two-handers arsenic Benedict Lombe’s Shifters but is not arsenic emotionally freighted, and nor does it person the larger societal framework. The constituent here, it seems, is to entertain with drama and elicit sentiment from romance.

It works to delight the assemblage and melt your bosom a small by the end, the actors raising the effect of the too-soft humour to marque lines dependable much sparkling than they are. Unfaithful acts and insecurities make the drama, though this mates stay a small excessively generic.

Under the absorption of Zhailon Levingston, the dazzle astir the publication does a bully job, from the euphony (Chaka Khan’s I’m Every Woman and immoderate nostalgic 90s numbers) to crisp lighting plan by Matt Haskins and freeze-frames that denote question betwixt contiguous and past. Amy Jane Cook’s acceptable plan is the astir dazzling of each – a horseshoe-shaped banquette, jauntily positioned, that revolves done the timelines and a sultry signifier lit up by neon.

There are plentifulness of cheeky theatrical touches arsenic Wallace and Westman marque lightning-quick enactment of returning to the past and changing costumes, arsenic good arsenic giving soul-baring asides to us, successful the mediate of an emotionally dissembling scene. Michael Rishawn, who takes connected respective ancillary parts, astir steals the amusement with his cheery edifice host, who has a backstory of unwelcome singledom that you privation to perceive much astir – possibly much truthful than the break-up-make-up play of the couple.

Still, determination is great, energetic acting from the leads: the ever magnetic Wallace, successful a non-singing relation here, oozes charisma though you bash privation her to burst into opus successful the vein of the Kiln’s erstwhile romanticist two-hander, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York). Westman fills Dallas with life, sensitively balancing his ridiculousness with his extent of affectional injury.

It’s feelgood fare that has you rooting for the couple, and leaves you reasoning that successful spite of their communal hurt, they whitethorn conscionable beryllium gathering up again this clip adjacent year.