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- [00:31]
Mickey Jo
There's certainly a lot that you can say about the musical adaptation of American Psycho. You can talk about the tone, the inherent challenge of bringing this story to the stage as a musical. But one thing that you cannot fault is the executions. Honestly, they are killing it on stage. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to those of you listening to this review on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre and when I wake up in the morning, I use a cleanser on my my face. Oh dear. It does occur to me that this would be the perfect opportunity to deliver the skincare routine that a couple of you have requested. Basically, the answer is just good lighting, I'll be honest. But I am sat here with you today to discuss the return of the musical adaptation of American Psycho to the Almeida Theatre in London where it first premiered over a decade ago. Yes, before heading to Broadway, the show was first seen by London audiences with then Doctor who alumnus Matt Susan Smith in the role of Patrick Bateman, a role made famous on screen by Christian Bale in the 2000 film adaptation of the 1991 novel by Brett Easton Ellis. American Psycho, set in the 1980s and back when this show was first making its world premiere at the Islington venue over a decade ago. Who was in one of those audiences but a young Mickey Jo Theatre. Now it is early 2026 and the production is being brought back to the venue in something between a remounting and a revival by the now outgoing artistic director Rupert Gold. American Psycho, having been major production when he joined the venue as artistic director, so truly bookending his time at the Almeida. And so there is a considerable amount to reflect on here as well as the big picture ideas of, you know, does American Psycho work on stage as a musical? This gruesome story of 1980s Wall street apathy and horror. But also, how has the show changed and evolved since that original production and the subsequent Broadway misfire? And once more with a sold out run, how is it playing to audiences a decade later? Plenty for us to discuss today. As always, I will be sharing my opinions with you, but I would love to know yours. Share all of your thoughts about American Psycho the musical in the comments section down below. And of course, if you would like to stay up to date with the rest of my reviews, make sure that you're following me here on YouTube or on podcast platforms. In the meantime, let's talk about Patrick Bateman singing and dancing on stage in American Psycho. So for anybody not familiar with American Psycho, I recently read the novel in anticipation of seeing this musical on stage once more so I can tell you all about it. I haven't seen the Christian Bale led film adaptation, which I know is something of a crime. Admittedly, it's not as much of a crime as most of the stuff that he does in the film. American Psycho is set during this 1980s Wall street boom, and it depicts a psychotic yuppie named Patrick Bateman who by all accounts is obsess with image and trends and fashion and going to the right restaurants, the ones that are impossible to get a reservation to, and dating the most attractive, attainable women, regardless of whether or not you have any kind of emotional involvement in the relationship. Patrick's obsessed with making the correct styling choices and listening to the best music and owning the newest technology and having the most attractive business cards and constantly fixating on how his hair looks. You know, just once in a while. The man's relatable. However. However, in spite of this unending pursuit of what is hip and trendy and fashionable, there is still a void that cannot be filled, and in order to try and feel something, anything, he turns to a relentless killing spree, committing multiple graphic, senseless acts of random violence, murder, mutilation, the descriptions of which on the original pages of Brett Easton Ellis's novel are just torturous, conveying a level of utterly horrifying gore which Thankful the Musical never particularly aspires to. The plot of the book has been entirely condensed and streamlined. One element of the original novel is how relentlessly repetitious it all is. He goes to dinner again and again and again, and we get dozens upon dozens of food orders. We hear about dozens of different restaurants, dozens of different women who he dates, dozens of different business colleagues that he goes out with and is consistently bored by. We get perhaps hundreds of descriptions of the clothing that everyone is wearing, including himself. We get various pages of grisly murder and torture, as well as a handful of entire chapters. Reviewing the discography of the likes of Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News, I had no idea that Patrick Bateman was so into media criticism and while a key fixture of the novel is to convey the idea of this individual who is sleepwalking through a very cyclical existence and constantly turning to the same things in pursuit of contentment and satisfaction. Satisfaction both. The film, I believe in the stage musical extract the stronger moments of plot in order to form a more shapely narrative, one in which we are acquainted with Patrick and the other key figures in his life. We meet some of the immediate members of his family, we meet his closest friends and colleagues. We meet his girlfriend and the woman with whom he is having an affair, as well as his professional rival, Paul Owen, who, he has just learned, has been allocated the very important Fisher account, which sends Patrick into an immediate rage. This, in the music, being the thing that stirs him into his earliest acts of onstage violence, which, again, are neither as frequent nor as explicit as they are in the book. There is also something of a romantic subplot with Patrick's secretary Gene, who, he announces to the audience is presumably in love with him. In the musical, though I believe not. In the book, he to some extent believes that he might reciprocate that love, though he can't really be sure. The man is not particularly in touch with his own emotions, and by the end of the thing, he doesn't really have a strong sense of his own identity and reality. Talking about Patrick Bateman as an individual who only theoretically exists, the conclusion of the entire story is also fairly ambiguous, and we could talk about different interpretations of American Psycho. The musical doesn't necessarily contend with much of an explanation because this entire adaptation is less meaningful than it is stylish. And what's very interesting is I think the whole thing balances on the assumption that the majority of the audience will already have preconceptions about American Psycho and Patrick Bateman as a character. There isn't as much heavy lifting in the material to explain this complicated individual as you would expect there to be if he was being freshly introduced. It feels very reliant on the fact that we already know who he is and what he's up to and what's going to happen, to some extent. And so there is this familiar quality as Patrick Bateman arrives at the beginning of the show elevated from the substage, delivering this familiar monologue about his morning routine. And the reaction from the audience is almost tantamount to a sort of a chuckle of recognition. The entire show and the presentation of Patrick Bateman in these moments of exposition, I think steers perilously close to the world of parody. It almost feels like a deliberately comic American Psycho musical at times. The thing that keeps it from going over the edge is this tone, which is only one part campy to several more parts chilling, but largely just stylish, which is the principle adjective with which I would describe this show. It's a stylish adaptation of American Psycho that doesn't busy itself with an awful lot of storytelling or a particularly hefty dose of meaning. At a time when, once again, the world is experiencing mass social division and asking difficult questions about the ethics of capitalism and wading, I think, through a real crisis of empathy, it does feel as though a reinvigorated version of American Psycho brought to the stage in 2026 ought to have a little bit more to say about a char like Patrick Bateman and his peers, rather than simply allowing the audience to giggle at their very vacuous, callous worldviews. And there evidently is some level of fondness for this production from Rupert Gold. Otherwise, you know, it's a curious choice to conclude his very impressive tenure as the artistic director of the Almeida, and I was wondering in the moments before it began whether this would be considerably more successful because perhaps the original was in some ways ahead of its time, even though so much of it is nostalgic. And while I don't remember every detail of my first visit to the show more than a decade ago, the feeling that I merged with afterwards was much the same. I was impressed by the production, both the creative choices and the performances. But like an expensive bottle of champagne yet to be opened the most, I really was.
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- [09:54]
Mickey Jo
Visit wells fargo.com autographjourney Terms apply. Was chilled. Let's talk a little bit more about the material and particularly the original score from Duncan Chic, which exists in the show alongside a handful of pre existing songs. And I ever had a conversation about whether it would work better as a play because people didn't necessarily find the songs all that powerful or impactful. And curiously, I think some of the most impactful moments of music in the show were achieved via the use of pre existing songs from the 1980s, many of them referenced in the original novel. And I presume Also present within the film, including. Including It's Hip to Be Square, which we hear sort of ironically, the pep of the whole thing juxtaposed against this act of extraordinary violence. When we first meet Patrick's secretary, Jean, she enters while listening to the song Everybody Wants to Rule the World and singing along, although I have a dramaturgical issue here, because she's not singing it in the original key, so you can only assume that the woman is tone deaf enough not to notice that it sounds terrible, but capable enough to be able to stay in her own key the entire time. I'm absolutely reading too much into this. We hear on more than one occasion the Phil Collins song In the Air Tonight, which we come to understand is foreshadowing these moments of violence and murder. It's right there in the lyrics. I can feel it coming. As well as a cheeky little bit of Human League thrown in at the end there. And in comparison, the songs that Duncan Chic has written for the show aren't as striking, aren't as memorable or meaningful in terms of how they've been written or how they are used. They are, more often than not, laid back. It's very sort of 1980s new wave as it ought to be, but it characterizes the show's score and material, and with that, the entire production with this sort of emotionally detached and cold quality, which is not a million miles from the book. However, there's a key difference, because the really insidious thing about the book is as it gains pace and the narration from Patrick becomes more frenetic and abrupt, we end up in these passages where interchangeably, he is talking about what he's deciding to have at a fancy new restaurant and what he plans to do with the severed head that he's keeping in his fridge later. And that sudden, eerie switching of gears is a very difficult thing to achieve on stage. And so we have something of a tonal pivot for the stage musical, which does dial up the camp factor just a little bit to quantify that a little bit more. A lot of the book's more shocking content, not just around the violence, but talking about AIDS and racism and homophobia, has been left out of the stage adaptation. But we have found time for an Epstein joke and a Trump impression, which I believe used to be Tom Cruise in an elev, who I guess will be either disappointed or thrilled to hear he is not as topical. But because we are expecting the deaths and anticipating the deaths and then sort of announcing them with this musical clue, we don't have any of the shock factor. We are willing him to kill these people almost just because we know that it's necessity of the narrative and there's not all that much gore and bloodshed. I'll talk more about how they achieve this in the production, but you have to question when you take all of that out of American Psycho, exactly what it is that you are left with and what the real justification is of wanting to turn this into a musical in the first place, especially with an original score that is so underpowered. Which is not to say there aren't any songs that I enjoy. I will have you are what you wear in my head for weeks after seeing this show. It's a fun sort of fashion number that Patrick's girlfriend Evelyn and her best friend Courtney sing while they are getting ready for his birthday party. Any lyric that can rhyme Mahi Mahi with Isaac Mizrahi. I'm sorry, but that is campy and brilliant. The song is basically a wittier, more sophisticated version of the most generic pop single you will ever hear released by a real housewife. Just basically speak, singing over a beat and rhyming with different fashion brands. There's also one moment of piercing emotional sincerity when Jean, who truly cares for her boss Patrick, questions how he feels about her and what she could bring to his sad and empty life in the second act and wonders whether he could possibly love her or if she is simply a girl before, whatever that might mean. But it's a nice song for anyone who is familiar with the material beforehand and wondering if this is the original London version or the updated Broadway version. I gather that this incorporates a lot of the Broadway changes. We have a different opening number to the original. It's one of those people walking around in business suits numbers while singing lots of business buzzwords, giving it like check your watch in a lunge and walk across the street with purpose choreography as they're singing like complete the transaction, come on baby, sell it out. Which certainly commences the show with a little energy than its predecessor, when Patrick was just kind of hauntingly singing and now I'm clean the living dream or whatever that lyric used to be. It does, however, I think, characterize him as being obsessed with the corporate ladder, which it would seem as though he is, but we come to realize he doesn't actually care about that in the same way he doesn't really care about any other aspect of his life. I'm not sure that the material really cuts to the heart of who Patrick is or understands himself to be or doesn't understand. Understand himself to be, as the case may be. One of my enduring memories about the original production was they were singing this song at his birthday dinner about Sri Lanka. I remember, oh, Sri Lanka. As this sort of recurring tuneless motif which has become, oh, the death of downtown. As Patrick lists off all of these other sociopolitical problems, but with both the detail and the scale of his atrocities kind of excised from the show's material, we end up in a sort of a shapeless second act that has no real sense of progression. And we're just waiting for one of various pennies to drop. To tell you a little bit more about this newest staging of the show, let's talk about the creative choices and the performances of this.
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Mickey Jo
Too easy.
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Mickey Jo
New company. So the creative team, it would seem, remains basically the same as when the show was first produced at the Almeida, still under the direction of Rupert Gold with great choreography by Lynn Page. Probably one of my favorite creative aspects of this production, it somehow felt of the decade, but also contemporary with a sense of vitality, but also very robotic, whether the company is doing an erotic exercise class or writhing around the stage playing corpses. And it's a really formidable company this time around. A lot of fantastic rising star talents, captivating performances. When they're all dancing together, though, you are hard pressed to be able to watch absolutely anyone else other than Hannah Yun Chambers Chamberlain. Every time I see her on stage, she is nothing short of mesmerizing. Now, last time, in a very eye catching piece of casting, Matt Smith was playing Patrick Bateman. This time it's Artie Frouchan who was just seen at the Almeida in the line of Beauty playing an only slightly different kind of a character. And he does play a very different kind of Patrick Bateman to Matt Smith who had this deliberately cold behind the eyes quality and this stagnant, very sullen vocal, ruthless and unflinching. Arty is considerably more expressive. It's almost the littlest bit over articulated at the beginning. And if he was to animate this anymore, it would start to feel just legitimately like a Parody of a Patrick Bateman style monologue. It's the difference between like, this is what being Patrick Bateman means to me and this is what being Patrick Bateman means to me. Like it's not quite that dramatic, but it's getting there. Neither of the two particularly seem to have been singers. First, Artie has a couple of moments where the upper range of his voice feels a little shallow. But it's not a particularly demanding score. It doesn't particularly expect a Patrick Bateman to have a soaring baritone. What he does do capably more so than his predecessor, is execute a lot of the choreography. And there is something sinister and unpredictable about the way he moves around the stage. Almost animalistic in this very wide eyed expression across his face. And this sort of the Joker from Batman kind of a smile. In a lot of the full company numbers his mania is contrasted by this very blank expression progression across the faces of the ensemble who move in and out of the space through the audience and occasionally stand around the stage, which is this time around a large sort of square thrust. The audience being sat around three sides of it. The back of the playing space being this brick arch perhaps nodding to tunnel. The nightclub that they make reference to visiting. As well as a sort of clinical but also sort of office interior curtain. John Clark's lighting and Finros's video design work in conjunction to give us a lot of really stylish moments. There's a lot of video happening on the LED floor in this production. I think they did more stuff on back walls previously. But they use the floor for a lot of sort of glitching blood splatter rather than us seeing literal blood. I mean, he comes back at one point covered in blood. But we don't have blood spraying out over the first rows of the audience or anything. It exists more with this kind of drenching red lighting. One of my favorite moments visually is when Patrick is at a club and he is on one side of the stage with a bartender on the other. And there is this long strip of white lighting on the floor them. And a drink is tossed down sort of saloon style across the playing space. That's very cool. So much of it is cool and stylish. I love the creative choice when they go out to lunch together, all of these financial executives and the waitress is sort of seductively taking their orders by putting a handheld microphone to each of their mouths as they announce what it is that they're going to have and talk about these various different complex dishes. Almost all of them inevitably ordering some Kind of sophisticated fish wish. Katrina Lindsay's costume design puts us in the era. I don't know if all of the suits that the men wear necessarily give us the breadth of character between them that is described in the book when they're introduced. I also don't know if the most expensive look as expensive as perhaps they ought to. I wasn't completely convinced by Mr. Bateman's initial suit, in contrast to the original production, where he used to just arrive in a pair of ants underwear. But there is a real sense of cohesion in the direction, in the aesthetic, in the material, with everything committing very deliberately to this veneer of style. The best performances in the show understand that as well. They are, I believe, given by Emily Barber as Evelyn Williams. She is fantastic in this role. Something of a revelation here, hounding Patrick to agree to an engagement, brushing off his murderous admissions and flirting shamelessly with his best friend, Tim. Princess Price, played by Ollie Higginson, my favorite stage performance of his to date. He is brilliant in this role. He captures very well, I think, the characterization from the book of the one character who might even have less patience for these various social encounters than Patrick does. Asher Parker Wallace and Tanisha Spring are underutilized stars. Jung Si Yong is a very tickling Lewis Carruthers, whose personal revelation is charming and funny even in this production, even if it is portrayed in a way that is clearly not meant to be any kind of a surprise. Kim Ismae remains complet indispensable in a handful of different roles. But Daniel Bravo, I think, may be one of the most impressive in this company. And he's played roles not unlike this one before. He's playing Paul Owen, Patrick Bateman's nemesis. And it is, I suppose, a similar late 20th century egotism that we saw him performing as Sebastian in the Cruel Intentions musical. But he is brilliant here. It's an utter confidence and just a really fantastic characterization. It can be challenging, I think, to do choreographed musical theater and play it in a way that is cool and masculine. And Daniel, Daniel and a lot of the others in this company managed to do that very well. Now, it does feel perhaps a little redundant to be considering whether or not I would recommend this show, which is already, I believe, sold out for the duration of its run. If, based on what I have told you about it, you would like to go see it and you don't yet have tickets, I would advise you to go and check out the Almeida website. There are often returns, sometimes even on the day. Check out what their policy is for those because of the playing space extending out further forwards than most of their productions. I think it's definitely better to sit downstairs for this one if you can, but they don't use the very front corners of the stage, so don't worry too much about those seats up in the circle. And I would say that this is a piece of theater that has an awful lot to enjoy about it. I keep using the word stylish, but that ultimately is what it is. I don't think it's quite as as captivating or unnerving or disturbing as you might expect an American Psycho musical to be. It also doesn't lean all the way camp. If you think that this is going to be some kind of a silly, insincere production that doesn't live up to the original version, then you needn't worry necessarily about that. The greatest fear, I think, is just walking away feeling as though it wasn't that impactful. If you are a nervous theater goer, then it's not not all that scary or suspenseful. It certainly doesn't offer that much gore. There's one little moment, but it's after the fact. If you have any specific questions about the show, I will do my best to answer them in the comments section down below. But I would say adjusting your expectations to a sleek, cool, visually exciting piece of theater that won't necessarily take you on a vast emotional journey might be your best way to enjoy your upcoming visit to American Psycho. Of course, if by the time you are seeing or listening to this, you have seen the show already, I would love to know what you thought. Especially if you disagree with me or had any thoughts that I didn't share, please let us all know in the comments section down below. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed listening to my thoughts. If you did, make sure to subscribe right here on YouTube so you don't miss any of my upcoming reviews or follow me on podcast platforms. I have been Mickey Joe and as always, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a Stage Stagey day for ten more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theater oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a Stagey day. Subscribe.
- [24:56]
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