Review: Escape Room the Musical (The Other Palace)

Grownup Playhouse invited me to review a preview of Escape Room the Musical at The Other Palace as a double bill with The Detective’s Demise, in advance of both shows (and other productions of theirs) appearing at Edinburgh Fringe.

Six old college friends are tricked into reuniting in an escape room. That is the premise of this story.  The set was as the title suggests; an escape room with props in random places to be discovered.

The musical numbers were a highlight for me, each of these were performed to a consistently high standard. Some of them were returned to later in the show, which was a tool that worked well. This was particularly the case with a song that was first sung by Ellie (Naomi Park) and later revisited by her sister, Poppy (Georgina Hart), with variations on the lyrics, highlighting the sibling rivalry between the two.

Kit Colville as Pierre was a huge highlight performance-wise but I’m not sure how Pierre fits into this established group of friends, if at all. Perhaps he was just chucked into the escape room by the people who run it to make up the numbers? This is unclear. However, the character did add to the show comedically (and what a fabulous French accent), so with a bit of fleshing out of the backstory he is a welcome addition.

There were a few sound faults which were slightly distracting. It’s not so much that you couldn’t hear the words at all, they carried well in this space, but more that when a performer’s mic isn’t functioning properly around others whose are, the sound contrast is very noticeable.   

The reveal fell a bit flat for me.  I wonder if it would have been more effective if someone external to the escape room had set everything up. 

Finally, I personally felt the show would have come across stronger without the constant breaking of the fourth wall. It wasn’t so much broken as smashed to smithereens, but I would have preferred to have felt more like I was observing what was going on in an escape room without the characters knowing, rather than the sense of being involved. This is obviously just my personal opinion, but in the past I have observed an actual escape room through the CCTV monitor and to me this sort of point of view would have been so much more effective. The whole point of an escape room is, you’re locked in with no interaction with anyone from the outside.

This is a brand new production, and as I saw it back to back with another show by Grownup Playhouse Productions which is a bit more established, I am confident that with some further development, this show will evolve into something more cohesive.

Escape Room the Musical is heading to Edinburgh Fringe, and you can buy tickets here.

⭐⭐1/2

If you would like to see my curtain call photographs from this and other shows, please visit my Instagram.

I was gifted a ticket for this show in exchange for an honest review.