High above Manhattan, the stars of Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) Sam Tutty and Christiani Pitts stand on a rooftop singing a preview of songs from their new Broadway musical. The Empire State Building shining behind them as they belt out high notes and raise a single arm into the air, the moment is so cinematic you’d have thought you were in a Nora Ephron movie. “It’s a very surreal moment. Nothing that I had planned for me in my life at all when I started the show,” says Tutty, grinning. The young star is now making his Broadway debut in West End role that has carried him across the Atlantic.

The new musical—written by Jim Barne and Kit Buchan, and directed by Tim Jackson, currently running at the Longacre Theatre—has been described as a romantic comedy that blends sweetness and struggle. Tutty, trying his hand at a quick pitch, describes it simply: “It’s about two people. Dougal, my character, goes to New York. He’s been invited to his estranged father’s wedding and is being picked up at the airport by Robin. They meet each other, and what happens in the next two days is how they change each other for who they should be rather than who they want to be,” he pauses dramatically with a smirk. “That’s all I’ll say about it.”

If that premise sounds like the beginning of a great rom-com…well, that’s by design. “Initially, we started out writing a Christmas musical,” Buchan explains, “and it soon moved away from that. But what remained was a contemporary Christmas story that was kind of inspired by the movies set in New York. So, New York was part of the DNA of the show from the very beginning.”

Hear from the cast and creative team of Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) below.

The trajectory of Two Strangers seems straight out of a movie. The musical, from an unknown team, first premiered in 2019 in the small town of Ipswich in the U.K. before transferring to London and becoming a West End sleeper hit. It then flew across the Atlantic to Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre. And now, seven years after conception, Two Strangers has finally landed in the city that inspired it, to Broadway. “It feels like a really, really special moment,” said Jackson, still a bit dazed by the journey. “Seven years from when we started. So, it’s been a long and happy journey.”

When Jackson first encountered the material, he didn’t hesitate. “The producer sent me a script, which was sort of Act One, and a couple of songs, and I listened to ‘New York,’ and I thought, ‘Whoa, this is a song for the ages.’ And then I honestly read only a few pages of script before I called the producer and said, ‘Please don’t show this to anyone else.’ I love it so much.” The characters, he says, “just jumped off the page.”

That jump is crucial, because Two Strangers is built on the smallest possible cast: two actors in one city, yet with infinite emotional terrain. For a director, that’s a gift. “It’s so yummy for a director to work with two actors,” says Jackson, “because you get to flesh out their characters with them and find the detail and the nuance and all the gems that were within the text.”

And if the city is the show’s third character, its set design of towering suitcases makes that metaphor visible. “We wanted to create a set that was full of surprises and could change into different shapes,” says Jackson. “A bit like going around New York. You turn a corner and there’s something different.” He adds that scenic designer Soutra Gilmour “does abstract in the most beautiful way,” he says with excitement and admiration in his voice. “We’ve got these two stacks of suitcases that sort of symbolize that sort of left-luggage feeling that our characters might be feeling. It’s a transient space that can sometimes feel really fun and exciting, and other times feel really stressful and sort of lonely. It’s quite a large-scale set with a double revolve, and it’s a playground for our actors.”

Those actors are, by all accounts, delighting in the playground. Pitts, who is returning to Broadway after leading the company of King Kong in 2018, is relishing in her character. Compared to the creators and Tutty, Pitts is a relative newcomer to Two Strangers; she joined the cast in Cambridge. “Robin is the realest character I’ve ever played,” says Pitts. “She does not sugar-coat, which is something a lot of people struggle with. Robin doesn’t do that. So, I love it. And New York is very much a character in this show. And I love how she doesn’t have time for that character until…” she smiles and looks away. “Well, until she does.”

For Tutty, an Englishman who grew up watching New York City flicker across silver screens, the love is more literal. “As a Brit, we are exposed to New York in film, TV, you know? And we are sort of (not in a weird way) taught to love it and taught to revere it. And this is where you have to be for cool things to happen… like superheroes!” He laughs, adding, “I remember my first time here, I literally couldn’t believe it.” Tutty’s admiration for NYC is mirrored in his character’s wide-eyed wonderment for the city. Dougal can only see the city through rose-colored glasses when he arrives. “Any flaws that are there are purely positive, which is a real fun thing to play … It’s amplified by Robin’s very real (not necessarily pessimistic), but very honest experience of the city.”

Creators Barne and Buchan understood that duality from the start. “What we wanted was to make sparks fly between these two polar opposite characters,” says Buchan, “One of whom is a kind of cynical native New Yorker who’s seen it all, and the other is this impossibly naive Englishman who’s just spent all of his life dreaming about coming here.”

The songs also reflect that polarity. “We were very lucky to work with a pop producer called Lux Pyramid,” Barne explains. “We’re musical-theatre writers. We love musical theatre, but he’s managed to sort of infuse [the songs] with pop, sort of American and British pop as well.” Buchan describes it as “sprinkling a special kind of pop magic over it.”

Transformation, in fact, is the show’s quiet subject: how people, when thrown together, make each other new. “Already [the musical is] becoming richer. I think it’s a gift to keep getting more and more iterations and more stabs at making it the best it can be,” marvels Jackson.

Barne and Buchan still speak about the piece with the awe of its earliest days. “You might think that it gets boring to sort of reinvestigate the same work for 10 years,” says Barne, “but as soon as you’re in there and you’re watching the actors, it’s just so humbling and so exciting to see them elevate the work so much.” 

Buchan nods in agreement, adding: “It’s the home of musical theatre,” he said. “And it’s the home of our show. We want New Yorkers to come and see it and feel represented. And we want people who are strangers to New York to come and experience that euphoria.”

For Pitts, revisiting the piece means getting past the nerves of her first run in the show, since it is a two-person musical. “There are a lot of words, and that first time around,” she says with a deep exhale, “[there was] some anxiety around, you know? So I love that I have a base. However, our director is so brilliant in that we are not simply recreating; we’re diving deeper, exploring more, and that’s an actor’s dream.”

Tutty echoed her. “We have such a strong foundation of the show,” he says as he softly bumps his shoulder against Pitt’s. “We know the beats, we know the stakes, and our objectives. But now we can get onto commas and hyphens and what that pause means.”

That attention to commas, to the micro-beats of connection, is what makes Two Strangers feel both intimate and cinematic. Small, but sweeping. “It’s so cool,” Pitts said, still beaming. “I love that the show is daring people to…care about two people who are not extraordinary in any way. They’re these amazingly normal people who are experiencing very normal things. It’s really nice that we’re taking a chance on seeing how people figure out life and try to maintain some sense of peace and happiness.”

After all, every New York story is a duet between optimism and exhaustion, between the newcomer who can’t stop craning their neck upward and the local who’s seen too much to look up anymore. Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), with its revolving luggage towers, its improbable meet-cute, its mix of British pop sheen and American brass, spins that duet into something bright and human. The production aims to locate romance not in perfection but in proximity—and the ordinary, miraculous fact of two people moving through the same city at once. “New York is the protagonist and the antagonist,” reminds Tutty. The line draws laughs, but also lands like gospel.

And what could be more extraordinary than that?

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Go Inside the Star-Studded Opening Night of Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)

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