Review: Hit Machine
[Soho Theatre || July 8th to August 15th 2025 || 1h 15m]
Wes, a successful music producer, receives a visit from his listless younger brother Alex at his luxurious home. Alex, desperate for a big break in the music industry and currently going through a tumultuous and sudden breakup with his fiancé, wants Wes to help him, relying on memories from their childhood when they used to make music together in the garage. Wes, meanwhile, is dealing with a crisis with his latest signing, who has been caught on camera assaulting a fellow rapper. As the two brothers first reminisce and then squabble, old tensions and traumas rise to the surface, which causes a strain on their relationship that threatens to destroy it entirely.
It’s a plot and a thematic thrust we’ve seen hundreds of times before, and often in better plays. Jonathan Caren’s script, while perfectly well structured and sprinkled with the occasional thoughtful aphorism, is predictable to a fault and he is never willing to sink into the grit and grime of the various ideas that run through the narrative. Issues of family trauma, jealousy, modern masculinity and violence are all flirted with but the text remains firmly within the comfort zone of surface level tensions, lest it unearth something more complicated and knotty that it would not be able to disentangle. As a result, all the beats are generic, as though they’re an unintentional mirror of the commercial, manufactured records that Wes produces, which sometimes leaves the production grasping for something to actually say.
Nonetheless, it just about works because the performances are solid enough to make the fraught relationship between the two brothers feel authentic, even if their individual characters are patchy and underdeveloped. Josh Radnor and Noah Galvin have a fractious, sparky chemistry (though I must confess I thought they were lovers for the first five minutes or so…) and as all the hidden traumas and wounds in their relationship are exposed, they both do fine work capturing how it is possible to love and hate someone simultaneously. Radnor in particular is adept at playing cold and hard-faced, while Galvin’s expressive naiveté masks his character’s deep-seated anxiety and insecurity.
Daniel Bailey's unobtrusive, clean direction further allows the performers to just do their thing and the set is neat and does not distract from the unfolding drama. The smallness of the Soho Theatre stage, which in this production is fenced in by audience seats at both sides, heightens the sense of a claustrophobic tightening that resembles a panic attack, particularly in the final third, and as the tension reaches a crescendo and the stage becomes the scene of a brawl, one gets the sense that the walls and the environment really are crashing down around them, and it is in these moments that Radnor and Galvin do their best work.
The piece also has a pleasant musicality to it and Noah Galvin’s soulful voice makes the snippets of songs that punctuate the various arguments and disagreements between the two brothers a delight to listen to. There’s a real appreciation for music as an artform pumping through the text, and it often feels like a celebration of the ability of music and songwriting to deconstruct and explore emotions in a way that words sometimes cannot. Meanwhile, Khalil Madovi, who wrote the music for the text and also stars as Wes’ fresh new megastar, has great stage presence and elevates musical moments that, like the dialogue, are a little perfunctory into something that grips the audience's attention and tickles our need to move to the rhythm.
Hit Machine is fine. It breezes by in 75 minutes and the performances are good enough that the problems with the script don't sink it entirely. Galvin, who is just breathtakingly handsome and effortlessly charming, and Radnor are easy to watch and playful on stage, and Madovi likewise has a breezy energy that keeps the momentum of the piece moving nicely. It won't change the world and I'll have forgotten it by the middle of next week but it's a nice enough time at the theatre that knows what it is and does it well.
Tickets for Hit Machine are available here.