Nobody Loves You
ACT's Sparkling Musical Send-up of Reality Dating Shows
By: Victor Cordell - Mar 14, 2025
Competition-based reality shows have become a staple of television. Who can best tame a forbidding wilderness; or produce the best recipe from an omnium gatherum of surprise ingredients; or sing with the most affecting voice? But the most enduring format long precedes the era of reality television - the competitive mating ritual, with contestants opening their hearts and trove of secrets on national television in hopes of being The One.
“It’s time for you to pack your things and go, because Nobody Loves You.” That’s the pronouncement that no contestant wants to hear on the show of the same name. Yet all but the final survivors will hear it from the show host. The victimizer, Byron is aptly depicted and portrayed by Jason Veasey as the shallow but engaging man with a radio DJs honeyed voice and a wardrobe of glittery and brightly colored tux-like outfits. Like the contestants, he is a laughable yet likeable caricature of the type of staff involved in the show’s production.
For the greater part, the musical aims low, but it keeps the laughs coming. It succeeds in part because the talented actors work their butts off making comedy; because the situations seem plausible but absurd; and because the pop-rock music is catchy and propulsive. The contestants with silly behaviors vary from portrayer Seth Hanson’s very Christian Christian (no, that is not a typo) to the dipsomaniac hottie Megan (Molly Hager) to the spacy and gullible animated dynamo Dominic (John-Michael Lyles). And then there is the contestant with all of the model characteristics and pat answers, Samantha (Ana Yi Puig), even though she is a total put-on, e.g., she says she’s laid back, but she’s really uptight.
Jeff (A.J. Holmes), who hates everything, is stirred into the mix. He is the guy who went to a children’s play and was the only one in the audience not to give a standing ovation. Why? Because the production was too childish! An all-but-dissertation doctoral student, he appears at the show’s studio in search of his recent ex-girlfriend who hopes to be on the show. Holmes is good at being humorously sour as he displays great disdain for everything the show represents, openly denouncing it for denigrating and exposing contestants to embarrassment and for being driven by selfish motives. He shares his summary feeling to the show runner Nina (Ashley D. Kelley) – “I hate your stupid ass show.”
Despite Jeff’s outrageous behavior, Nina is convinced that his hostility and his fox-in-the-henhouse behavior as a contestant would actually boost ratings. Jeff sees the opportunity to develop a dissertation topic from the experience and expose the show from within, and voilà, a match made in comic hell. Along the way, Jeff will find a sympathetic ear in the Assistant Director Jenny (Kuhoo Verma) who hopes to be a documentarian.
Though Nobody Loves You premiered in 2012, ACT workshopped the show for this production, updating the situations to current time and revising some of the songs. Are there serious undertones to the resulting musical? Sure. It’s about how people make moral sacrifices in their personal work that they wouldn’t settle for elsewhere. It reveals how inauthentic people are as they put on faces to gain recognition. It shows how people put themselves above others when they’re really not and how they fail to be loved if they don’t love themselves. And much more.
But it’s best appreciated at a superficial level. We laugh when Megan tries to lure the sexually inhibited Christian into the hot tub, and when Jeff is constantly dumbfounded that people don’t see the folly of what they’re doing and that they don’t see the world as he does. We enjoy Kelley’s little “wink wink” as Nina when she notes how several of the contestants look a lot like her – because she is playing all of the roles. And we enjoy all of the manic performances. I was particularly taken with Verma as Jenny and Puig as Samantha, both of whom have wonderful singing voices and vivid expressions that gleam all the way to the back of the theater.
Pam MacKinnon directs, and the production values are as strong as the acting and singing. Jason Ardizzone-West’s clean scenic design effectively uses partitions that close into square apertures, emphasizing the connection with filming. Russell H. Champa’s lighting, Jessica Paz’s sound, and Sarita Fellows’s costumes combine to complete the effective staging.
Nobody Loves You, with book & lyrics by Itamar Moses and music & lyrics by Gaby Alter, is produced by American Conservatory Theater and plays at Toni Rembi Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA through March 30, 2025.