Written by Austin Winsberg, with music and lyrics by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner, First Date is the kind of small-scale, studio musical The Old Joint Stock does well. It takes the form of a first date between Aaron (Michali Dantes) and Casey (Rokaya), who have been set up by Casey’s sister, Lauren, the wife of Kevin, one of Aaron’s colleagues at work. It is performed here with a cast of five, rather than the Broadway seven-actor version, and the remaining three actors, Lowri Hamer, Tom Kitely and Joey Warne, multi-role as various waiters, friends and family.
The proliferation of dating shows on TV such as First Dates, Love Is Blind, Love Island, Married At First Sight, Naked Attraction, et al, shows there is a fascination for the format, and Miriam Battye’s brilliant 2023 Edinburgh Fringe hit Strategic Love Play proved it can work theatrically, too.
First Date is set in a New York restaurant, and it is structured around the stages of a first date, signposted along the way by numbers such as “First Impressions” when Aaron and Casey first meet, “The Awkward Pause” when they run out of things to say and “The Check” when they have to negotiate who pays for the meal. It plays out more or less in real time with pauses in the action while Casey and Aaron talk to the audience and various other characters comment on how the evening is progressing and offer advice on what they should do next.
The cast is young and energetic and the show rattles along at a tremendous pace. Joanne Marshall’s set is simple and effective: just three small restaurant tables and four chairs against a backlit, cut-out New York skyline with green leafy panels either side, and Jacob Finch’s lighting works well.
The show is produced by The Old Joint Stock’s in-house creative team of James Edge and Emily Suzanne Lloyd as director and associate director, Ellie Begley as choreographer, and musical director Callum Thompson. It all adds up to a thoroughly enjoyable night out if you don’t think too hard about the show itself. First Date is not a great show, though.
It was first produced in Seattle in 2012, the year in which the dating app Tinder was launched, so a dating show set pre-dating apps has a rather old-fashioned feel in 2024. There is a reference to Match.com and a whole number about Googling your date, "The World Wide Web Is Forever", but this is very much a period piece.
All of the characters are stereotypes. Casey’s gay best friend, Reggie, is every gay best friend you have seen in every American romcom, and Aaron’s Jewish Grandma, Ida, Casey’s bad boy ex-boyfriends and her Valley Girl sister, Lauren, are all caricatures.
Aaron enters with glasses and a beard to show he is nerdy and socially awkward and Casey has a wrist tattoo and works in an art gallery, so she is straying into manic pixie dream girl territory. The song “First Impressions” sums them both up: Aaron says of Casey, “She’s a little bit artsy, She’s hip and cool” and Casey describes Aaron as, “a bit annoying, And overdressed, He’s got the kind of vibe that says, ‘Look at me, I’m stressed!’”
This would be fine if they then go on to discover that their first impressions were wrong, but they’re not; that describes exactly who they are and the story plays out exactly as you would expect: uptight, wealthy man is liberated by sexy, low income woman.
The young cast means the reference to Casey’s ticking biological clock makes no sense. Aaron and Casey are clearly intended to be in their thirties, when talking about wanting to settle down and start a family might be appropriate, but it sounds odd coming from a pair of very young-looking twenty-somethings.
The show also has an uncomfortable misogynistic streak. When Casey calls Aaron a Blind Date Virgin, he calls her a Blind Date Slut, and when Aaron says, “At the end of the day, looks go”, it’s not his looks he’s talking about.
Casey encourages Aaron to get over his ex-fiancée, Allison, but rather than learning to see things from Allison’s perspective, and maybe reflecting on his own role in the break-up, he launches into a vicious rant about her, “You're a bitch with no heart, you're a liar, you are Satan, And I hate the way you snore at night. You're a cock-freaking-tease-girl, you never stop your talking, And at times you got a double chin”.
If you’re looking for red flags on a first date, then someone expressing a violent loathing of their former partner says get out now. There is also a scene in which Casey tells Aaron she has a child by one of three possible fathers. She hasn’t really, it’s played as a comedy routine to freak Aaron out, but why would you do that? Red flag No. 2.
The hard working ensemble get some of the best numbers. The songs are mostly pastiches, but they are witty and clever, so Grandma Ida’s number, “The Girl For You”, is in the style of a Jewish klezmer song, “The Awkward Pause” quotes Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound Of Silence” and “The Check” is very Kurt Weill.
First Date is another excellent Old Joint Stock in-house production with a talented cast, inventive staging and a super live band. But the test of any romcom is whether you want the leads to end up together, and I must admit I thought Aaron and Casey should have swiped left on this one.