Review of the final at Bloomsbury Theatre, London

For anybody who attended the Musical Comedy Awards final in 2025, it may put your mind immediately at ease to learn that the event has recovered from what amounted to a technical disaster last time round. Attendees of this year’s ceremony won't be able to complain that the evening lacked technical proficiency, whatever else they thought of proceedings.

Four heats and two semi-finals have led us to this stage: the Bloomsbury Theatre. Host Nick Horseman also returns for his 11th outing - and as it turns out, his last. He's a passable host, but you sense he's commendably stepping aside because he feels somebody else could give the ceremony what it needs. 

He’ll be aware that the energy in the room feels low tonight. A skilled host would be able to remedy this issue, and Horseman probably understands that he isn't quite the person to pull that off. Tonight, his running ‘bit’ sees him deliberately soliciting heckles from the audience, to reinforce the rule that we should be respectful, dignified audience members when the finalists are performing. 

Admirable, certainly - but he’s not really good enough at responding to heckles to actually make it fly. It's also probably fair to say that this overwhelmingly male line-up might at least feel a little less unbalanced if somebody of another gender was leading proceedings. For the sake of brevity, then, this review is just going to flag when any of the finalists aren't white guys with guitars.

Before those finalists, though, the winners of this year's Best Newcomer award, John and Christian, form part of the warm-up efforts. They look like Busted, dress like Busted and also sing songs about being in school, yet manage to be less funny than that band (and somehow I have actually seen Busted live, so this statement is factually rigorous).

All of which means the first finalist Jonny Bennett comes on to a thoroughly unwarmed up room. Though as soon as he dives into keyboard-led songs about fancying his girlfriend’s dad, you’re not worrying about him. He makes a couple of well-pitched dirty jokes, then rounds things off with a stand-out number on Nigel Farage.

More on him a little later. Bennett is followed, though, by Joe da Costa, who’s competing as a finalist for the second consecutive year. He comes second in the competition overall, which he’ll presumably be happy with. A skilled, frantic guitar player, he’s got clear potential, but three of his comic ideas centre around the idea of him possessing a toxic trait - talking over women in meetings, say. If you’ve only got a six-minute slot to impress an audience, you could perhaps be mixing things up a bit more than that.

Australian singer/guitarist Sophie Banister isn’t on a sure footing with her opening subject of London, nor once she quickly pivots to discussing her hometown of Brisbane. Though her closer Don’t Be An Immigrant, Be An Expat has some teeth to it, and is better as a result. Ben Coleman, meanwhile, also starts on shaky ground, and has two jokes about his genitalia that need urgently removing from his set, but he ends well - his song about using Microsoft Windows is one of the standouts of the night.

Finalists in this competition tend to lean musically conservative, so loop machine-wielding improvised crowdwork comedian Dru Cripps, pictured, stands out on that front alone. He clearly has a bright future ahead of him. And indeed, he does end up winning the competition. Which actually feels straightforwardly unfair on the other acts, as he performs for nearly eight minutes rather than the regulated six. 

It’s all the more significant, given that his set could’ve done with being trimmed down by those extra couple of minutes. It also leaves you wondering what a few of the other contestants could have done with a little extra time to make their case. You can definitely see why there’s excitement about him, but in the realms of audience participation, loop machines and improv, you feel as though this could’ve gone a lot better ‘on the night’.

Another act returning from last year’s final, Irishman Eoghan Collins trades in punchlines that tend to lack innovation, as if we were seeing somebody who hasn’t developed their writing since succeeding at open mic competitions.

‘It's wonderful to be here tonight, at this guitar convention.’ Harpist Sam Hickman opens up the second half, glammed up as if about to perform an hour of show tunes in Vegas. Sam wins third place overall tonight, and she can probably feel hard done by. 

Clearly destined for big things, Hickman is equipped with a voice filled with operatic drama, and can also joke comfortably on the trans experience. Her only fault is not cutting down her (baggy) song so as to make room for a second number. Do that, and you feel fairly confident she would've won this competition. It’s one fatal flaw in what is otherwise quite clearly the most thrilling set of the evening.

Proceedings continue with London-based Indian guitarist Aadar Malik, whose set is fairly middling. His best joke is about Brexit - which he then spoils by explaining it to the room, despite it receiving a good laugh. Will and Noah, meanwhile, are a (non-guitar) duo, performing musical-theatre style numbers. They’ve got a decent song set in a restaurant, but memory-aid tune Wallet, Keys, Phone underwhelms. A track about age gap relationships, meanwhile, feels like a couple of good ideas stretched out without enough properly good lines to fill a full song.

Vinny Shiu is a London-based Chinese guitarist who feels naturally funny, although you sense this is still early days for him: a lot of his material isn't yet hitting the mark. It also feels as though keyboard player Chris Iskander fritters away his six minutes, with a song that drifts on for too long, and perhaps also takes too much time building up to one punchline. 

Rounding off the finalists, Tom Veck is helped along by interesting subject matters: a song where the audience vote on what they would or wouldn’t do in exchange for money? Or maybe one about dumpster diving? With sharper comic writing, there’d be something in it. 

That leaves us with a headline set by social media stars (and previous finalists) Sugarcoated Sisters, who succeed in being perhaps the fourth best act of the night -  though this might be more down to how phenomenally well-drilled their music hall-style songs are, rather than their humour being particularly stand-out.

So: with eventual champion Dru Cripps overrunning and Sam Hickman lacking a second song to bolster her case, that leaves Jonny Bennett as the act who would have been most deserving to win. Hopefully he doesn’t feel aggrieved by missing out - he was at least given the audience favourite award for his efforts.

There are a few tweaks that could be made to the Musical Comedy Awards, then. Considering the quality of acts always seems to vary, would it work better to have ten finalists rather than 12? The main point of these shows, however, is that you come away with two or three acts that are really going somewhere. Performers you are absolutely going to keep your eyes on. That’s unquestionably the case tonight.

The Musical Comedy Awards are clearly an admirable organisation doing everything entirely for the right reasons. Really, the most important role on the night is the host – choose their next one well, and any weaker acts will feel much less like a perilous issue. It will start to feel like a decent night out.

Review date: 13 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Mark Muldoon
Reviewed at: Bloomsbury Theatre