Book, Music and Lyrics: Mark Sonnenblick
Director: David Cromer
“If you’ve never been someone’s muse, I recommend it,” monologist Trevor reveals at the start of Mark Sonnenblick’s new show, introducing his years-long love affair with composer Arthur in uptight 1960s New York. Staged as a farewell cabaret on the day Arthur dies, Midnight at the Never Get may be set in a small Greenwich Village club but in reality is the transformed auditorium of the Menier Chocolate Factory where Sonnenblick examines the tragedy of long and lost love, and perhaps more interestingly the human happiness ‘real’ artists are prepared to sacrifice for success.
In the early 1960s, singer Trevor meets composer and pianist Arthur, who form a dynamic cabaret duo that takes them around the hippest cabaret venues in New York. But as the music world shifts away from crooner ballads to rock and roll, their relationship begins to flounder, especially as Arthur refuses to fit his songs around the heterosexual norms of the industry, that is until a big break beckons for one of them.
Although it technically has two actors with a third making a final cameo appearance, Sonnenblick’s 90-minute show is essentially a single perspective: Trevor’s view on the events of his grand romance that has shaped his life, presented as a cabaret story he is telling the assembled audience. And while he increasingly interacts with Arthur as the 1960s unfold, it is clear that his boyfriend is entirely a projection of his own mind, a memory that may be a glamourised or reshaped version of the truth. It is an interesting premise that sustains the piece for a while, with Sonnenblick’s character stepping in and out of meta recognition that the actor ‘playing’ Arthur is only Trevor’s accompanist who keeps getting the tone wrong, but Midnight at the Never Get doesn’t do enough with the device to land the empathy it is looking for.
Sonnenblick’s songs are cabaret echoes of Ivor Novello, Noël Coward, Cole Porter and eventually Burt Bacharach, evolving as the 1960s unfold, which suit the mopey intimacy of the clubroom set superbly designed by Scott Pask with cabaret tables and plush banquettes. Strangely, it is Gregor Milne’s voice as Arthur that better suits the music than Ben Platt’s as Trevor, but both find plenty of heartfelt emotion in every line and clearly being a muse is as painful as it is flattering in the end.
Despite taking place in a context of deeply entrenched homophobia, legal threats and, later, riots in the city, these events feel muted and distant while the spiralling love affair never supplies enough jeopardy to carry a show that becomes overly repetitive and insubstantial. The audience learns little about Trevor and Arthur beyond their jobs and their sexuality, so when Sonnenblick asks the viewer to feel for this couple, it is Arthur’s story that should be more interesting, a man who changes himself and seems to compromise his art in order to be revered. And there should be far more to say about the consuming nature of creation, the desire to “leave something in the world” than Midnight at the Never Get has time for. The man who gets left behind and his broken heart just aren’t that interesting.
Runs until 12 September 2026
