REVIEW: HIT MACHINE by Jonathan Caren at Soho Theatre 8 July – 15 August 2026

‘this show is a triumph, wonderfully funny and bone sad’ ★★★★★

Ok, let’s just get this out of the way. Hit Machine is magnificent. From start to finish, this show is a triumph, wonderfully funny and bone sad. The writing, performances, direction, staging and the music. All of it. Everything is so very good. The standing ovation on the night (so common in the West End today it’s best to bring knee supports) was, in this case, thoroughly earned.

Now that’s over, perhaps you’d like some detail?

We’ll begin with Josh Radnor as Svengali on-the-turn Wes, a hit music producer facing decline after years of success and having to play host to his kid brother Alex (Noah Galvin). Wes is taciturn and welded to his phone, surfacing from his terminal busyness only to deploy tech-bro aphorisms about the importance of whole foods. He has made a cage out of his success, desperate to leave behind a ruined childhood, to never depend on anyone again. Radnor is outstanding in the role, brilliantly capturing Wes’s learned coolness and older-brother-knows-best sensibilities, while hinting at a suffocating terror within that only grows as the story develops. His comic chops, unsurprisingly, are impeccable (a talent luckily shared by the rest of the cast).

The set, Wes’s flat, is perfect, a suite of pornographic aspirationalism, all lacquer and strategic ferns under ‘rich folk’ lighting. It serves as a monument to Wes’s career malaise, a desperate attempt to project success and stave off irrelevance after a lack of bankable signings (alas, he passed on Sheeran).

Enter younger brother Alex, a fellow musician with Brooklynite pretentions and a pious refusal to engage with any aspects of the industry that might make him money. Ostensibly visiting to ask Wes to rescue their mother from bankruptcy, it’s soon clear that this committed self-sabotager needs help and wants what his brother has, a state neatly summed up in the memorable lines “I’m ready to sell out. I just don’t know how”. Galvin truly shines, equally hilarious and desperately vulnerable, yearning for closeness with his distant brother and much haunted by their upbringing. The chemistry between the two actors is excellent and they beautifully realise Jonathan Caren’s remarkable script, effortlessly playing off the brothers’ moments of sincerity and emotional wedgies.

Then bad news. Wes’s much needed new signing Defy the Leader (an electric Khalil Madovi), caught amidst a media storm over a public scrap/pretzel robbery, is having issues in the studio and shows up at the flat for a crisis meeting. His arrival only accelerates the underlying tensions. Shining as conflicted wunderkind Defy, Madovi brings a magnetic stillness and presence to a musician on the edge of giga-fame, firmly resisting Wes’s efforts to pigeonhole him into a sellably violent caricature. Madovi’s virtuoso talent has him doubling as sound designer on Hit Machine, also providing additional music and lyrics and he is nothing short of brilliant in an end of play ‘live show’.

When Defy prefers Alex’s overnight bedroom beats to Wes’s painstakingly marketised efforts, a showdown is unavoidable and comes in an exchange of the atomic cruelty reserved to siblings and war criminals. Then a heartbreaking finale, in which these two men regress to the boys who lived in terror of a violent father. Radnor and Galvin’s tenderness is almost painful as they slowly reach back for one another, to exorcise their past and begin again.

Overall Hit Machine is a beautiful, hilarious exploration of trauma and family tension and is deeply embedded in a genuine love for and appreciation of music. All three cast members are themselves musicians and coupled with the script and Daniel Bailey’s tight and assured direction, the show is remarkable for its-into-the-weeds exploration of creativity and artistic expression in the face of commercial pressure. The original music from Ben Harper and CJ Harper is stellar and adds real authenticity.

Not much else to say. There’s Sun Tzu jokes, onstage skipping and a row over San Pellegrino. What more could you want?

HIT MACHINE

At Soho Theatre 8 July – 15 August

BOX OFFICE https://sohotheatre.com/events/hit-machine/

Written by Jonathan Caren

Original Music by Ben Harper and CJ Harper

Directed by Daniel Bailey

Starring Josh Radnor Noah Galvin & Khalil Madovi

Photography: Bautista Araya