APARTMENT 40C

Musical:  Tom Lees - Music; Ray Rackham - Book and lyrics

London Theatre Workshop - 5th December, 2014

Synopsis

The musical explores how relationships are affected by the endless possibility of choice.

Told over the course of one evening, the musical examines decades of love, happiness, regret and loss; chances taken and options missed; and how it is sometimes impossible to make any kind of distinction between the past and the present.

Story 

Over the years, a house or a flat may contain many different households and witness much. This musical is concerned with three couples from three different segments in the timeline of a New York apartment. It shows just one significant evening for each pair but presents them all at the same time. Attention shifts between pairs, the others becoming the background to another’s time zone though physically present, even in complex proximity.

It starts with a woman on the phone to her mother. It is Kate, a restaurant critic, cooking dinner for her husband, a lawyer who is late home. Then there is Katie, just moving into the apartment, who has started a job as an intern at the New York Times, phoning her mother to reassure her everything is all right. Then there is an older woman, Kathryn, telling someone she may stay over and fly back to the mid-West (where she has a TV food show) in the morning.

After Katie goes off to shower, a young man arrives. That’s Eddie, a young lawyer who has just flunked his finals, who is also moving in. When Katie comes back, there is a problem. He is in the same time zone: they are both there on the same evening; they both think that they have the tenancy.

The restaurant reviewer’s husband eventually turns up. They are packing up home to move to Connecticut. Then the third husband arrives, or rather ex-husband. That pair are packing up to sell the flat in which their son has been living. This information doesn’t all come easily; it is acquired gradually.

The first pair excepted (their relationship is only just starting), Apartment 40C gradually reveals each couple’s back-story together and how they relate to each other.

Cast