Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)
Opening Night: November 20, 2025
Theater: Longacre Theatre
Website: twostrangersmusical.com
An original, new musical comedy about timing, connections, and unexpected detours. Meet Dougal, an impossibly upbeat Brit who has just landed in New York City for the first time to attend the wedding of the father he’s never met. Meet Robin, the sister of the bride and a no-nonsense New Yorker with a lot of errands to do for the bride—including picking up the groom’s estranged son from the airport. These two strangers begin their journey together navigating New York City, secrets, and second chances.
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November 20, 2025
The effervescent new musical comedy “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York),” which opened on Thursday at the Longacre Theater, is the most charmingly simple show on Broadway right now — a stellar debut for its authors, Jim Barne and Kit Buchan, and the actor Sam Tutty, who plays the irrepressible Dougal. Transferred from London’s West End by way of Cambridge, Mass., this twinkly two-hander delivers lavishly on the promise of a rom-com: laughter, escape and fantasy.
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November 20, 2025
I felt a disorienting generational whiplash throughout the treacly rom-com Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York). The latest British musical to make it through that country’s off-off ranks and onto our shores, it follows two 20-somethings during a whirlwind wedding weekend in present-day New York. And yet it fundamentally misunderstands Gen Z, is shot through with elder Millennial sensibility, and had a mostly older crowd wiping tears of laughter from their eyes. They seemed to thoroughly enjoy it, so congrats to all involved, but let me submit my dissenting opinion anyway.
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November 20, 2025
But once the two are no longer strangers, the score, which most pointedly recalls Adam Gwon’s similarly small-scale tunes for Ordinary Days, loses its precision since there’s only so many positions available for Robin and Dougal to assume—frenemies, confidantes, will-they-won’t-theys—before the story starts to spin its wheels. Instead, there are too many novelty numbers about Christmas carols and Tinder swiping not really grounded in who these people are, plus wispy soliloquies that can only credibly inch each character forward. Two Strangers, spanning two days of personal growth in two hours and 20 minutes (including intermission), is both far too long for the audience’s attention and far too short for Dougal and Robin’s transformations.
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November 20, 2025
“Two Strangers” is one of those rom-coms where the two lovers are wrong for each other. He’s too boyish, she’s too brittle. It’s a new soul/old soul dynamic. That frisson works initially because, in a story too complicated to tell here, he sets her up with another guy on a dating app. Maybe Dougal and Robin will just become very good friends. Unfortunately, no.
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November 20, 2025
When the show’s creators zero in on those feelings, something a lot more specific and wistful than a love story between two strangers, the piece comes alive. If only it stayed there.
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November 20, 2025
What elevates the show from an assembly-line rom-com is the way Barne and Buchan balance the genre’s baked-in cliches with sharp left turns and nuanced commentary about life experience and personal connection. “Two Strangers” ain’t packing snow, but it’s not powder either. The musical comes dangerously close to cloying sentimentality at times, but Dougal’s dry sense of humor and Tutty’s first-class delivery prevents the story from ever getting too soupy.
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November 20, 2025
“Two Strangers” is funny in places, occasionally moving in others, and just a little off-feeling throughout, as if it is trying too hard to charm across the storytelling and whimsy chasms it creates for itself. Its flaws are not fatal, thanks to the singing skills, charm, and likeability of Pitts and Tutty who generate the right kind of tricky, rather than star-crossed, chemistry.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 20, 2025
Tutty is an absolute star in the role, displaying boisterous enthusiasm as well as a tender naivete that hints at the inevitable act two disappointment to come. The actor’s flawless comedic timing and delivery drive the bulk of the show’s many laughs. He makes Dougal irresistible, and the character’s unwavering zeal is countered well by the world-weary New Yorker in Robin, whose initial reaction to Dougal’s eager beaver nature is eye-rolling annoyance, even if she finds herself being drawn in nevertheless.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 20, 2025
Two Strangers could have sunk into treacly territory, but it stays afloat on a banter-filled book and twinkling contemporary score by Jim Barne and Kit Buchan. While the lyrics aren’t groundbreaking, the sonorous ballads play to the stratosphere even when patter songs register as clunky. In less competent hands, this modest musical (one that could play well in smaller theatres) would drag at two hours, but luckily, Two Strangers intersperses its reveals with stirring emotion and rich humor.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 20, 2025
But that doesn’t begin to describe how much sheer fun the evening provides, thanks to the terrific, stylistically varied musical score, witty lyrics, and hilarious book. But even more thanks to the lead performers, who invest their portrayals with such sharp comic timing and emotional depths that you find yourself rooting for this unlikely couple to get together.
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As to newcomer Tutty, who took home last year’s Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his take on the imported Dear Evan Hansen: His “New York” introduction makes it dazzlingly clear that a London musical leading-man hasn’t been carried in on the local theater tide since Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence and Anthony Newley in The Roar of the Greasepaint-The Smell of the Crowd. Tutty’s appealing looks, pure voice, comic instincts, and obvious acting skills, and somehow resemblance to a living Teletubby make him the huge plus for a vital Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) run.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 20, 2025
So while this show held me for Act One with its considerable charm, by Act Two, it was hitting turbulence. 90 minutes and out would have been a better plan. On the plus side, “Two Strangers” does have quite a witty book and a few sticky tunes. Dougal will be a dreamboat, I suspect, for some teen theatergoers, and there is an amusing set from Soutra Gilmour that imagines New York entirely through carry-on luggage, spinning on a turntable that resembles baggage claim. It’s cool.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 20, 2025
What I found most surprising about this modest, appealing two-person musical, whose title more or less sums up what happens, was the reaction to it on the night I attended – the ecstatic cheers at the start; the mobbed stage door afterwards. The show’s social media marketing campaign won over a couple waiting at the stage door, they told me, but they also just liked the show. I liked it as well, but I might be doing the musical a disservice by mentioning the audience enthusiasm, because it could set up misleading expectations.
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