Stalled
21 February 2025
King’s Head Theatre
2.0 out of 5.0 stars
The world premiere of Stalled: A New Musical is currently running at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington. Hotly anticipated, this production promised a celebration of womanhood, with a variety of touching stories converging in a posh restroom in Seattle.
Maggie, currently working as the cleaner in this restroom that seems to be in a large corporate office type building, meets a variety of other characters as they float in and out of the gorgeous set containing four toilet stalls, a console of sinks in the centre, and a comfy looking lounge sofa at the back. The show immediately jumps into the first song, the titular Stalled, drawing on both the setting of this musical, as well as the feeling of being stuck in life, incapable of moving on and finding one’s own way.
While the idea of a celebration of womanhood in a semi-public toilet seems appealing, unfortunately the problems of this production are obvious quite quickly. Not only is the main storyline of Maggie and her daughter very transparent very early on, every single character popping into the loo feels so stereotyped, it reeks of tokenism. Apart from the bad character writing, the emotional stakes are too high way too fast. The audience doesn’t get a chance to get to know the characters at all before highly emotional songs are belted out. While the voice talent is absolutely staggering, with gorgeous voices throughout, there’s only so much a very skilled and talented cast can do with a messy script that doesn’t give them room to explore and connect. But most of all, the selection of characters is so over the top in stereotypes, it’s painful to watch.
There’s a middle aged frustrated mother, alcoholic and on Xanax, battling hot flashes with a handheld fan (which causes noise distortion in the microphone it is being frantically held up to) and trying therapy to help her myriad issues while patting herself on the back for being an understanding “autism mum” with a song that’s literally titled “different, not broken” in which she muses how her weirdo daughter could ever be actually liked and find friends, while her neurodivergent daughter is almost offensively stereotyped as a young autistic girl with all the tropes that come with it but none of them done well.
Additionally there’s Krystal, queer computer scientist whose Asian mother puts a lot of pressure on her to find a man and get married, to be more feminine and proper, her bisexual colleague and room mate who is of course very quirky and totally into threesomes (which she mentions in her first sentence on stage, oof) and has no boundaries in talking about very personal topics. This includes a scene of Krystal taking off a gaudy-yet-frumpy bright pink cardigan and slamming it down in front of her mother while shouting that she just wants to be herself, then shortly after returning in a shirt and waistcoat. The heavy-handedness knows no boundaries here.
Then there’s Serena, the 16yr old Latina poet who falls pregnant with the much older man she’s been seeing, teenage pregnancy, depression, substance abuse, of course Serena gets it all heaped onto her. Every stereotype and trope you can think of to create a diverse, female-led, inherently disingenuous and stigmatising storyline, it’s all here. None of the characters feel real, organic, like actual people. Rather, they all feel like walking tropes created by someone who has a very narrow field of experience of real life women outside of the heteronormative, neurotypical sphere. It’s uncomfortable and feels harmful to the demographics depicted, stigmatising already marginalised groups further.
And of course Maggie. Big story spoiler here, Maggie lost her daughter Robin recently and struggles to cope with the sudden grief. She has left her work and family behind to “find herself” working as a cleaner in a posh restroom, harassing every person who enters with unsolicited advice and overbearingly emotional invasiveness. Apparently her daughter died from smoking pot that was laced with Fentanyl, which is easily fact checked as something that does not actually happen and very likely wouldn’t even be possible. But this plot point is just as poorly constructed as every character within the story.
While the music is inoffensive (as opposed to some of the lyrics and much of the plot), it is also unremarkable. A pleasant selection of pop music that washes over the audience, with strong vocal work pushing the very emotionally charged songs into the aether. But without building rapport with the characters first, the feelings do not hit, instead it feels overly dramatic and disingenuous, wasting the voices and hard work of the actors on a subpar, poorly designed set of characters.
That being said, the cast works incredibly hard to try to make the most of what they have been given to work with, and their talent is truly staggering. The set is also absolutely stunning, both practical and visually stunning. So there’s two stars for that. Zero for the plot and character development.
