Night Bus review – a Leeds musical about the N1 that never leaves the depot

The idea is good. Night Bus, a new musical at Leeds Playhouse, takes place over one run of the city’s N1 night service from the city centre to Seacroft, with a driver, a dozen passengers and a running time that matches the journey almost to the minute. The set, a full-size double-decker that revolves, is a marvel. The band, hidden on the top deck, is tight. The lead, Amy Okonedo as the driver, Shaz, has a voice that could fill a room four times the size and a comic timing that does not need the microphone. And for about 25 minutes it looks as though the show might get where it is going.

It does not. The problem with Night Bus is structural, and it is one that new musicals keep falling into: the writers, Tom Garside and Lucy Sheard, have assembled a set of passengers, a nurse coming off shift, two students, a man who has been thrown out by his wife, a teenager who should not be out, and given each of them a song, and have mistaken that for a plot. By the time the bus reaches Harehills, every character has sung about who they are, and nothing has happened to any of them.

The songs themselves are mostly strong. Sheard writes in a pop-folk idiom that suits the setting, and Last Stop, a ballad for the nurse that Mira Patel sings from the stairs with the bus revolving slowly behind her, is a genuinely lovely piece of writing that will outlive the show. A group number about the particular etiquette of the top deck, which seats you sit in and which you do not, is sharp and funny and the closest the evening comes to saying something about the city it is set in.

But a musical needs a question, and Night Bus does not have one. The nearest it comes is a late scene in which Shaz has to decide whether to let a passenger off between stops, which is handled as though it were a moral crisis and resolved in four lines. The teenager’s storyline, which the first act had set up with some care, is abandoned. The man thrown out by his wife gets a reprise and a shrug.

James Brenton’s production does what it can, and the design, by Hannah Spence, with the bus turning through rain projected on a gauze, is beautiful enough that I spent several of the slacker stretches watching it instead. Okonedo deserves a better vehicle, which is a joke the show would make and I am not ashamed of.

There is a good 70-minute musical inside Night Bus, and the Playhouse’s record with new work suggests it may yet find it. For now, the bus goes round and round and the passengers sing and nobody arrives.

Night Bus is at Leeds Playhouse until 7 November.