Escape Room the Musical
Rating: ★★
Venue: The Other Palace, London
Cast: Lily Ong, Will Bartlett, James Warner, Tom O’Brien, Georgina Hart, Naomi Park and Kit Colville

A new comedy musical! Six college friends are tricked into reuniting at the debut performance of Escape Room: The Show. They must work out why, whilst trying to escape the room in front of you, the audience. Watch as their old issues resurface and new problems reveal themselves. Original songs, crazy characters and puzzling puzzles a-plenty.

It’s time for fringe previews! An important caveat to this review is that the show technically isn’t in its final stages just yet - as it only officially ‘opens’ once it has reached Edinburgh in a few weeks.

Escape Room: The Musical is one of Grownup Playhouse’s new shows for 2025 and, unfortunately, this is abundantly clear. Overall a slow, cringey, and unenjoyable attempt at meta theatre. The premise is as follows (I think):

• A guy grows apart from his uni friends and wants to get the band back together
• Instead of doing literally anything a normal person would do to achieve this, he secretly invites them all to an escape room…
• Except the escape room is actually a live show in the middle of London and they have to solve puzzles while simultaneously entertaining an audience who may or may not have been us due to an apparently invisible 4th wall.
• Some dude from said audience gets up to join them in the first 5 minutes and at no point does anyone question this, despite him never having met any of them before. He is funny and also French. Those are the only things we ever learn about him. 

As the hour-long show progresses, it becomes clear that the characters aren’t the only ones stuck in a room where they’d rather not be. The script unfolds to reveal secrets about each friend, as tantalising and scandalous as basic adultery and cheating on a nondescript test paper - not particularly riveting. 

Naomi Park is placed front and centre for each dance number, which makes sense as she is also credited as a choreographer, however all this does is draw (presumably unwanted) attention to some of the ensemble who are clearly less confident and capable. 

The show's primary redeeming features were the highlights of the cast - such as Georgina Hart’s cheeky and endearing portrayal of an underestimated younger sister, and Kit Colville as ‘Pierre’ whose role in the show I’m actually still not too sure of. Colville performs with the most natural Bordeaux accent I may ever have seen on stage, and I would be very shocked if he was not actually French. 

The idea of having a show that takes place in real time, somewhere like an escape room is frankly quite cool and interesting, but it seems like it has landed in unfit hands to be executed to the standard it deserves.