Like Father

Like Father follows Chris, seventeen, sent to live with the mother she barely knows after her father is arrested. A true-crime podcast picks up the case, the family's history becomes public property, and Chris has to work out who she is once everyone else has already decided.

The show is less interested in the crime than in the people standing behind it: a daughter carrying a name she did not choose, a mother who left, a stepfather trying to hold a house together. Jacob Ryan Smith and Caroline Pernick share the book, music and lyrics, and the score leans folk-pop. The writing is darkly funny as often as it is raw, and it takes grief, forgiveness and inherited shame seriously without turning solemn.

This is a new musical, developed through competitive new-work programmes before reaching the stage. It asks what a family owes an audience that has turned its worst year into entertainment, and what is left to reclaim afterwards. It suits people who follow new musical theatre, and anyone who has finished a true-crime series and wondered about the family still living inside it.