Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)

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Love is happiness and vice versa. That’s the simple message of the new British musical import Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), and it is enough. Infectiously whimsical and sentimental, the show juxtaposes these qualities against a New York reality that has little time for either. A place of endless opportunities for disappointment, the unseen city looms over the meeting of a pair of aching twentysomething hearts, one shielded by experience and the other innocence.

The former belongs to Robin (Christiani Pitts), a hard-edged native New Yorker subsisting on a mind-numbing job rather than a soul-stirring dream. By considerable contrast, Robin’s slightly older sister not only has the proverbial glam-and-glitz urban life, but is also on the verge of marrying a very wealthy and graying English businessman. Besides a yawning age gap between bride and groom, another sticky wicket is that Robin’s imminent brother-in-law made his fortune in the United States after abandoning his still unborn son across the pond. That would be the now adult Dougal (Sam Tutty), Robin’s forthcoming long-in-the-tooth nephew and emotional polar opposite, who she’s tasked with escorting by subway from JFK airport to his eighty-dollar-a-night downtown Manhattan hotel, which is as nice as it sounds.

A decidedly upbeat bloke with a boyish penchant for popular American movies, Dougal excitedly imbibes each new Big Apple moment that once solely existed in his hodgepodge of cinematic fantasies. Meanwhile, he also eagerly anticipates realizing one poignant flight of fancy: seeing his dad for the first time. Dougal’s wide-eyed whirlygigging is a lot for the pessimistic Robin to handle, especially with her patience stretched thin by her rictal existence as a barista, more wedding errands to run for an ungrateful sister, and her obsessive Tinder swiping. Dougal tags along for all of these bleak endeavors, lightening them with his special ray of sunshine.

Of course, Robin and Dougal are going to fall hard for one another, and, like many an affecting romance, their relationship blooms from the potent seeds of pity, desperation, and loneliness. Undoubtedly, there’s a bit of Stephen Sondheim in the soul of this production. But there’s some Jerry Herman, too, with book, music, and lyric writers Jim Barne and Kit Buchan cohesively blending a sterling trifecta of compositional elements to blatantly push towards a bittersweet ending that might have simultaneously satisfied Sondheim’s taste for mortal complexity and Herman’s charming willingness to ignore it.

Replete with well-crafted, character-defining solos and duets, the score for Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) accomplishes something rare on Broadway these days: respecting the audience’s attention. None of the songs are filler. One might reveal a gnawing pain within Robin (“And you watch/as they go about their lives/while you stay here”), just after another has exposed a plaintively hidden aspect of Dougal’s psyche (“Dad,/Have I held a candle high for you?/Have I waited all my life for you?”). And somehow the joining together of these sadnesses equals solace. On the playful side, that comfort is reinforced by fun numbers like the rhythmically pleasing “On the App,” in which Dougal schools Robin in the discerning art of the aforementioned Tinder swiping.

With its big, if economical, imagination, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) also seemingly contains a metropolis of non-digital humanity, thanks, in particular, to Tony Gayle’s robust and amusingly familiar sound design (“stand clear of the closing doors, please”). But Robin and Dougal are the only people ever actually present onstage, which is enough. As they repeatedly scale the twin mounds of literal baggage on Soutra Gilmour’s circular treadmill of a set–rotating away from and towards each other–the metaphoric intent is obvious. Still, it’s the promptly endearing Pitts and Tutty who must translate that visual meaning into a palpable bond, so that the audience cares deeply when it is eventually threatened by both past and future complications.

Christiani Pitts and Sam Tutty in a scene from “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)” at the Longacre Theatre (Photo credit: Matthew Murphy)

While its titular parenthetical suggests a much less hefty musical, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) does encourage a rewarding lift: to appreciate passion in the present, even if it can’t be safeguarded. That gives the show a sense of existential urgency in keeping with, say, Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock (ironically, not a musical, despite starring Judy Garland) rather than some easily consumable feel-good nonsense. It’s a state of mind that director and choreographer Tim Jackson, aided by the strobing effects of lighting designer Jack Knowles, giddily accomplishes in the kaleidoscopic number “American Express.” Funded by an entrusted-turned-misappropriated credit card from the soon-to-be affluently wedded, Robin and Dougal cast off their discontents and inhibitions for a long night of stereotypical New York excess that concludes with the truly magical.

But Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) isn’t just about new and romantic love; it’s also about the gloriously duller kind all of us, hopefully, are gifted from the start: parental, or in Robin’s case, grandparental. Shamefully easy to overlook, the show offers a reminder to appreciate love in these unconditionally self-abnegating forms, too. Raised by a single mother who tried so hard in the face of having so little, Dougal does it perfectly–if not wistfully for some–when he tells his mum during a transatlantic phone call, “you were always enough.”

Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) (through July 5, 2026)

Longacre Theatre, 220 West 48th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or visit http://www.twostrangersmusical.com

Running time: two hours and 15 minutes including one intermission