Ben Platt’s Next Act: A Queer Torch Song in London
TONY®, EMMY®, AND GRAMMY AWARD® winner Ben Platt is taking his next big swing not on Broadway or at an arena, but in an underground nightclub that exists somewhere between 1965 Greenwich Village and a queer afterlife of memory and music.
In the U.K. premiere of Mark Sonnenblick’s MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET, announced for a strictly limited run at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, Platt returns to what first made him essential: original musical theater built around a voice that sounds like a confession.
Take a Listen:
With book, music, and lyrics by GOLDEN GLOBE® and GRAMMY AWARD® winner and OSCAR® nominee Mark Sonnenblick, MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET is less a jukebox than a song cycle of resistance. Set in 1965 New York City, it tracks the romance of Trevor Copeland and Arthur Brightman, two men whose love is illegal in the eyes of the state but defiantly legible in the lyrics they refuse to straighten out for public consumption. Their act, “Midnight,” is staged in a secret nightclub where every male pronoun doubles as a risk.
Platt will play Trevor in this new production, directed by TONY AWARD winner David Cromer, whose work on THE BAND’S VISIT rewired Broadway’s sense of how quiet a musical can afford to be. For Platt, who has spent the last decade toggling between Broadway leads, prestige streaming (The Politician), and pop records, MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET is his first wholly original musical since DEAR EVAN HANSEN — a return to a character built from the ground up rather than inherited from a revival or a film.
Sonnenblick, now best known to a global audience for his hit songs “Golden” and “Your Idol” from KPop Demon Hunters, has been steadily fusing theater craft with pop instincts. His score for MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET nods to the Great American Songbook while insisting that the canon’s romantic language can belong to queer characters without disguise. The idea is simple and radical: keep the melody lush, keep the orchestrations classic, and let the pronouns do the political work.
The Menier Chocolate Factory — long a laboratory for transfers and reinventions — will lean into its intimacy by transforming into the Never Get’s nightclub, with Platt fronting a band in a space that’s closer to a jazz room than a proscenium. It’s an intriguing choice for a performer who has already headlined Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl, and who is simultaneously filming the decades-spanning adaptation of Sondheim’s MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG while sustaining a recording career that now spans three solo albums.
If DEAR EVAN HANSEN made Platt the face of contemporary Broadway angst, MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET positions him as something more old-fashioned and, paradoxically, more subversive: a torch singer.
The songs in Sonnenblick’s score are written as nightclub turns — crystalline, hummable, often aching — and the show’s structure lets a single voice move between intimacy and indictment.
In Cromer’s hands, that combination of exposure and restraint could turn Platt’s London run into the rare thing awards copy can’t quite capture: a star performance that’s built to be overheard rather than announced.
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