50 First Dates: The Musical at a glance

Show
50 First Dates: The Musical
Status
Closed at The Other Palace · world premiere ended 16 November 2025
Future dates
No transfer or UK tour currently announced
Genre
Musical (romantic comedy, film-to-stage adaptation)
Running time
1 hour 45 minutes, including interval
Age guidance
12+ (some adult themes and language)
Book, music, lyrics
David Rossmer and Steve Rosen (The Other Josh Cohen)
Director / Choreographer
Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, Mean Girls, Spamalot, Aladdin)
Lead cast
Georgina Castle (Mean Girls) as Lucy · Josh St. Clair (Ghost) as Henry
Source material
Columbia Pictures' 50 First Dates (2004), screenplay by George Wing
London run
14 September – 16 November 2025 (nine weeks, strictly limited)
Set & costume design
Fly Davis

Looking back: 50 First Dates: The Musical at The Other Palace

4.5
★★★★½

LTH Retrospective Rating

Retrospective by the London Theatre Hub editorial team. Last updated: 13 May 2026.

The Verdict

The early-2000s rom-com is the new mid-century musical: a body of source material rich in ready-made hooks, known songs, recognisable plots, and built-in audience nostalgia, ripe for stage adaptation. Clueless got there first. Mean Girls, The Devil Wears Prada, Burlesque, and 50 First Dates have all followed in short order. What 50 First Dates had going for it at The Other Palace was the people in the room. Casey Nicholaw is one of the most reliable directors in commercial musical theatre. Georgina Castle has the comic timing of a born musical-comedy lead. Josh St. Clair carried Henry's central conceit — falling in love with a woman who forgets him every morning — with a warmth that the film's Adam Sandler performance, twenty years on, somewhat conspicuously lacks.

Rossmer and Rosen's book did the necessary modernising: Henry was reimagined as a globe-trotting influencer (rather than a marine vet with a habit of seducing tourists), the more dated bits of supporting comedy were quietly dropped, and the central romance was given the kind of song-rich emotional architecture that musicals need and films often lack. The result was a show that didn't necessarily need to exist but, having been made, was made with care and skill. That counts for a lot in a season full of less competent screen-to-stage transfers.

What Makes It Special

  • Casey Nicholaw at full polish. The Book of Mormon, Mean Girls, Spamalot, Aladdin — Nicholaw's CV is the cleanest in contemporary musical theatre direction. His staging at The Other Palace had the same precise comic timing.
  • Georgina Castle as Lucy. Castle (Mean Girls) brought genuine comedic flair to a role that has to land "I forgot you again" thirty separate ways without ever being repetitive. She earned the standing ovations.
  • Modernised book. The 2004 film has aged in places. Rossmer and Rosen's book quietly removed the elements that don't travel well in 2025 — the walrus and penguin comic relief, the more leering elements of the supporting comedy — and replaced them with sharper character work.
  • Original songs, not a jukebox. The score was composed for the show rather than assembled from existing pop hits, which gave the production a coherent musical identity rather than the patchwork feel that bedevils many film-to-stage adaptations.
  • The Other Palace as launchpad. Andrew Lloyd Webber's development venue has a strong track record of premiering new musicals before larger commercial transfers. 50 First Dates' nine-week run was clearly structured as a tryout; whether a transfer follows remains to be seen.

Everything You Need to Know

What happens in 50 First Dates: The Musical?

Henry Roth — in the musical, reimagined as a globe-trotting travel influencer rather than the film's marine vet — is taking a holiday in Hawaii when he meets Lucy Whitmore, a local art teacher. They have a perfect first date. He goes to bed thinking he might finally have found the one. The next morning he comes back to the café to find her, and she has no idea who he is.

The condition

Lucy has anterograde amnesia, the result of a car accident a year earlier. She can form long-term memories of everything that happened before the accident — she remembers her father, her family, her work — but she cannot retain new memories from one day to the next. Every night, when she sleeps, the day resets. Her family have built an elaborate system around this: every morning she relives her father's birthday, the day before the accident, with old newspapers and tapes carefully staged so that she doesn't realise.

Henry's choice

Henry, having spent his adult life avoiding commitment, decides to court Lucy anyway. He starts every day from scratch. New first date, new strategy, new attempt to make her fall in love with him before sundown. The audience watches him work through every variant of the rom-com first-date sequence — the bumbling, the over-confident, the perfect, the disaster. Each one ends with Lucy going to sleep. Each next morning starts again.

The video

The breakthrough — and the show's emotional pivot — comes when Henry makes Lucy a video she can watch every morning to recap her life: the accident, the year she's lost, and the man who fell in love with her over and over again. The video allows Lucy to choose, every morning, whether to keep going with the relationship. The musical handles this differently from the film: it makes Lucy more clearly the agent of the central choice, rather than a passive recipient of Henry's persistence.

The ending

The musical ends — like the film — with Henry and Lucy at sea, on a boat, with the video routine now integrated into their daily life. They have a child. The relationship works, not despite the daily reset but in some sense because of it: every morning they choose each other again. It's a closing image that the show has earned, more so than the film did.