Midnight at the Never Get review – Ben Platt soars in honey-hearted cabaret-musical of 60s sweethearts

Platt excels as a crooner looking back on falling for his songwriter-lover – dazzlingly played by Gregor Milne – in a show of beguiling, bittersweet nostalgia and pristine songs

Ben Platt’s sky-gliding voice was made for decades gone by. The Tony, Emmy and Grammy award-winning actor (Dear Evan Hansen, The Last Five Years) is beautifully cast in Mark Sonnenblick’s (KPop Demon Hunters) out-of-time love story, a honey-hearted cabaret-musical of two gay musicians trying to make it in 1960s New York.

With the Menier Chocolate Factory set up as a lamplit cabaret (set by Scott Pask), Platt is Trevor Copeland, a crooning bar-singer reliving the years he spent with songwriter Arthur Brightman, played with plate-spinning brilliance by Gregor Milne. The history of their love is told through stories shaped around American Songbook-style music, only occasionally syrupy, as the pair slip in and out of Sonnenblick’s inventions: now a jaunty knee-bouncing number; now a big-band ballad.

While Platt is the show’s star, Milne is its anchor, at once believable as the troubled genius delivering his lover new songs like cups of tea, and the steady hand behind the piano, serving as the story’s pulse as well as the focal point for the flawless live band. There is a quiet power in the two men singing each other love songs, as they begin to do in public, with their clearly queer lyrics losing some audiences and gaining others. When politics comes knocking on their underground gay club’s doors, they face a fundamental choice: to protest, or assimilate. Central to their differences and their downfall, this dilemma gives grit to their otherwise largely jazz-smooth lives.

As darkness seeps into the story, we start to make sense of our narrator’s gaps in time and memory. Director David Cromer (The Fear of 13) retains the show’s intimacy by keeping things simple, with a minor magic trick – worth keeping secret – wrapping up the story’s loose threads, though the gut-punch would hit even harder with a trim. Midnight at the Never Get sees music as both heartbreak and cure. With one eye on who’s about to walk in through the door, it reveals what love leaves you with when all else is lost: songs to sing at the top of your lungs to the memory of who you used to be.

• At Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 12 September