Review: Broadway Transfer of West End Hit Two Strangers Doesn't Quite Take the Cake

When Dougal disembarks at JFK, he’s carrying a jar of Marmite, a wedding gift for the father he’s never met. Marmite is England’s most controversial condiment, with a salty taste so polarizing that it’s become a common metaphor for something people will either love or hate. Either way, Marmite makes you feel something.

But it’s hard to imagine the UK-to-Broadway transfer Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) inspiring Marmite-like reactions of either ecstasy or agony. Director Tim Jackson has found two lovable performers, Sam Tutty (who has been with the show since 2023) and Christiani Pitts, but their performances are far more flavorful than their jovially bland meet-cute.

Dougal (Tutty) bursts off the airplane like an inexhaustible British boomerang. He knows all about New York from Home Alone 2 and just can’t wait to see the White House when he gets off the subway. His assigned babysitter is his aunt-to-be Robin (Pitts), a cynical, born-and-raised Brooklynite. They’re the same age, but her sister is marrying Dougal’s much older father, and Robin is far more world-weary. She initially can’t stand Dougal’s fatiguing combination of clinginess and over-eagerness. Will Dougal crack Robin’s steely veneer? Will Robin convince Dougal that he’s complete even without his dad’s love? Will the cake they’re tasked with carrying across New York (though somewhat misleadingly, just in one scene, and in an Uber from Flatbush to Lower Manhattan) meet with disaster?

Two-person musicals are almost impossible propositions. Songs are driven by emotional shifts, and, with only a pair of characters to choose from, how fast do the protagonists need to evolve in order to express themselves differently in back-to-back-to-back musical numbers? It’s not a coincidence that all the remotely successful two-handers, from I Do! I Do! to The Last Five Years, span months or years of a relationship. Each scene can find the characters in a brand-new headspace.

There’s no such breathing room for Dougal and Robin, characters pushed by the show’s structure to change each other for good in under 48 hours, largely during a drunk shopping spree that they later only faintly remember. It’s not a coincidence that the three best songs are also the three first songs, as Dougal and Robin share their states of mind at the starting gate. Dougal’s paean to a “New York” he’s only imagined (“The city of stories where everything’s seventy stories high,” he gushes) is buoyant and catchy. There’s sweet charm in each character’s solo “I Want” song, as Dougal psychs himself up to meet his dad and Robin ponders if she’ll spend her whole life as a barista.

Jim Barne and Kit Buchan’s lyrics (they also collaborated on the music and book) are best when revealing Dougal’s childlike naïveté with unpretentious specificity. “Watching Lethal Weapon 2 together/Eating chicken Vindaloo together,” Dougal fantasizes, planning his reunion with his father. “Singing carols round the tree together/Watching Lethal Weapon 3 together.”

But once the two are no longer strangers, the score, which most pointedly recalls Adam Gwon’s similarly small-scale tunes for Ordinary Days, loses its precision since there’s only so many positions available for Robin and Dougal to assume—frenemies, confidantes, will-they-won’t-theys—before the story starts to spin its wheels. Instead, there are too many novelty numbers about Christmas carols and Tinder swiping not really grounded in who these people are, plus wispy soliloquies that can only credibly inch each character forward. Two Strangers, spanning two days of personal growth in two hours and 20 minutes (including intermission), is both far too long for the audience’s attention and far too short for Dougal and Robin’s transformations.

Yet the pair, especially Pitts, have moments of real luminosity. If Pitts got lost in the gigantism of King Kong several years ago, she’s the biggest thing onstage here, in brilliant musical theater pop voice and smartly showing Robin’s layers of cool detachment, deep-set shame, and buried tenderness all at once. And though Tutty sometimes makes Dougal a doppelgänger for Buddy the Elf (another overcaffeinated innocent who comes to New York in search of his father at Christmas time), there’s an appealing heartbreak beyond the fish-out-of-water shtick. They’re both well-served by Jackson’s impressively varied direction on a turntable stacked with light-up luggage that keeps revealing hidden compartments (the set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour; the lighting is by Jack Knowles).

The bittersweet conclusion, though staged elegantly, could achieve just as much emotionality an hour earlier. A stage direction late in the script describes Dougal and Robin as “frozen with incommunicable feeling.” The trouble is, that’s often an apt description of the show itself, too. And since there’s so much being sung about with very little persuasive passion underneath, it’s hard to feel much of anything in return.