Already Perfect review – Broadway star faces the past to make peace with himself

The title of this semi-autobiographical musical is also a massive spoiler. Broadway star Levi Kreis plays a version of himself, battling his demons and facing his past, only to conclude that, however flawed he often feels, he is in fact – ah, you’ve guessed.

This Levi stumbles off stage, inked and emotional, having been dumped by text during a matinee. After 11 sober months, he reaches for the crystal meth – but his soft-eyed sponsor Ben (Yiftach “Iffy” Mizrahi) urges him to confront his inner child, ideally in song. Levi is unconvinced – “my inner child is like Chucky, but he’s human, he’s gay and he thinks he’s Elvis” – but sits at the keyboard and yowls through the pain.

Matthew (Levi’s given name) slides through a crack in the wall; this cocky twink, excellently played by Killian Thomas Lefevre, takes the hero through self-hating adolescence (conversion therapy and rejection) into self-destructive adulthood (drugs and terrible men). Older and younger selves glower and snipe and slowly make their peace.

Yowling through the pain … Levi Kreis in Already Perfect. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Kreis’s untrammelled, often lachrymose dialogue leaves no room for nuance. Instead it whops you about the ears, spelling out exactly what Levi is deflecting or denying. He unpacks and explains his feelings – there’s nothing for the audience’s imagination to do.

His lyrics, too, tend to be on the nose – but his music has a compulsive secret life. It prowls from the Pentecostal rumble of a revival meeting to a bereft Nashville sob and a broken-hearted ballad which young Matthew diagnoses as Aretha meets Tori Amos. The alluring melodies offer the compulsive rhythms of old time religion, the irresistible drama of rejection – you see how these might hold Levi’s heart even as they damage him.

In Dave Solomon’s nifty production, a workaday dressing room transforms into a theatrical playground (design by Jason Ardizzone-West). Piano chords summon coloured lights, the wardrobe spills costumes, while a snap of the fingers prompts a spotlight and a prop dropping from the ceiling.

There’s no doubting the talent and sincerity involved in Already Perfect, and Kreis himself brings a big voice to this small stage. He tears the heart out of his songs and brandishes it, palpitating, above his head.