Babies: Musical review

Babies Review - Broadway musical

Review

Can a musical about Year 11 students looking after robot babies really sustain two acts without collapsing into a sketch? That is the central question Babies has to answer, and the clever part is that it answers it through tone rather than plot mechanics. Martha Geelan and Jack Godfrey take a premise that sounds thin, even faintly smug, and give it enough emotional friction to keep it alive. The show understands that adolescence is a performance of confidence staged over panic. That is where the writing bites. The jokes come quickly, the score has a genuine hook-driven snap, and then the material starts revealing the damage underneath. When Babies is good, it is very good indeed: funny without being coy, heartfelt without begging, and musically sharp enough to stop the coming-of-age material from feeling generic.

The score is the engine. Godfrey’s songs do not politely comment on the story from the side. They drag it forward. “Baby Baby Baby” works as an opening-number earworm because it keeps mutating across the evening, shifting from novelty to nuisance to something more complicated. “Hot Dad” is the obvious comic showpiece, and critics were right to clock it as a crowd-pleaser, but the better measure of the score is how smoothly it can pivot into interior pain. “Without Saying Goodbye” and “Mum” give the show its emotional authority. Those songs suggest a writer who knows that teenage speech is often evasive while teenage feeling is not. The lyrics are direct when they need to be, cheeky when they can be, and structurally useful almost all the time.

What makes Babies more than a clever youth-musical concept is its refusal to flatten the students into issue-led case studies. Reviews repeatedly picked up on themes of identity, pressure at home, and the weight of expectation, and that feels accurate. The best songs are not there to announce a moral. They expose coping mechanisms. Jasmine’s material carries the strain of being hyper-competent. Becky’s songs edge toward self-reinvention and self-alienation. Leah gets the bruising emotional center of the piece. Even the sillier boys’ material has a social purpose. “Hot Dad” is not just a joke song. It is a parody of teenage masculinity as status game, fantasy, and desperate costume.

The show’s style also helps. Babies lives somewhere between British pop-rock and contemporary musical theatre, with enough band energy to feel current without sounding like a playlist stitched onto a script. In his own account of the writing process, Godfrey described building full demos in Logic before Joe Beighton expanded them, and you can hear that rhythmic, groove-first approach in the finished piece. The music has heft. It pushes. That matters in a show with nine central teenagers, because the score has to do the heavy lifting of differentiation. For the most part, it does.

What Works Best

The strongest notices converged on the same points. The ensemble has proper voltage. The show is unexpectedly moving. The songs land. London Theatre called it “heartwarming and hilarious,” Operation Live Theatre found it “riotously funny” and “surprisingly tender,” while All That Dazzles praised the way the story grows into themes of identity and family strain. That is the consensus version of Babies, and it is broadly persuasive. The production seems to understand that sincerity is risky, especially in a show aimed at younger characters, so it earns its serious moments by arriving late to them. It does not start in confession mode. It starts in chaos.

The visual world appears to have helped too. Reviewers highlighted Jasmine Swan’s school-set design and the pace supplied by Alexzandra Sarmiento’s choreography, while some singled out specific visual textures such as the vivid pink state around “Someone Else.” Those details matter because Babies needs the stage picture to move like a crowded school corridor, full of alliances, gossip, panic and posturing. A static production would kill it. By most accounts, this one did not.

Where It Wobbles

The sceptical case against Babies is not foolish. The Stage called the premise fun but the results mixed, arguing that the coming-of-age story could feel thinly plotted. That criticism lands more on the book than the score. With nine classmates in play, not every thread can deepen equally, and the musical occasionally seems more interested in giving everyone a moment than in driving a single dramatic argument hard enough. The result is that some character arcs register as vivid flashes rather than fully developed journeys. You feel the shape of what each student is carrying, but not always the full force of consequence.

There is also the usual new-musical risk of tonal oversupply. Babies wants to be funny, contemporary, emotionally honest, socially observant and commercially catchy, often in the same ten-minute stretch. Mostly it pulls that off. A few times, though, you can sense the balancing act. The book sometimes hurries past material the songs are richer at exploring. In plain terms, the musical trusts its score more than its scenes, and it is usually right to do so.

Verdict

Babies is better than its elevator pitch and more musically literate than some bigger, glossier new shows. Its premise still sounds like a dare, but the writing keeps proving there is human material underneath it. The score has shape, personality and emotional timing. The book is lively, occasionally stretched. The production seems to have understood that the trick was never to make the robot babies feel real. It was to make the teenagers feel terrifyingly so. On that front, Babies largely delivers.