Award-winning music artist, composer, writer, actor and filmmaker Khalil Madovi is announced as the final cast member for the world premiere ofHIT MACHINE
A play about family, art and the making of music
Written by Jonathan Caren
Original Music by Ben Harper and CJ Harper
Directed by Daniel Bailey
Award-winning music artist, composer, writer, actor and filmmaker, Khalil Madovi is today announced as the final cast member for the world premiere of the play Hit Machine by Jonathan Caren. CJ Harper has also joined the team writing original music alongside three-time Grammy Award winner Ben Harper.
Madovi joins the previously announced US actors Josh Radnor (‘Ted Mosby’ on the Emmy-nominated TV series How I Met Your Mother) and Noah Galvin (Evan in Dear Evan Hansen) – both making their London stage debut – in the production at Soho Theatre directed by Daniel Bailey.
Hit Machine is a sharply comedic and emotionally charged collision between two estranged brothers, a genre-bending artist and a song that becomes the battleground for everything they have never been able to say. Madovi plays Defy, a fast-rising, once-in-a-generation hip-hop talent who is trying to straddle commercial success with the sound that launched him. Featuring original music by Ben Harper and CJ Harper, Hit Machine is an intimate, biting and explosive play about how pain becomes art, how art becomes commerce, and what gets lost when the machine starts feeding on the people who made it.
Khalil Madovi is an award-winning music artist, composer, writer, actor and filmmaker. After emerging in 2012 as Josh Carter in the hit TV series 4 O’Clock Club, for which he received the BAFTA award for Best Children’s Performer, he has gone on to embark on a diversified career in arts and entertainment, working across music, TV, film and theatre. After composing for and featuring in Can I Live?, for Complicité and The Barbican in 2021, he went on to design for Bush Theatre’s critically acclaimed Red Pitch, for which he received a Best Sound Design Offie nomination. Other credits include Nouveau Riche and New Diorama Theatre’s Brenda’s Got A Baby, The Old Vic’s This Is What The Journey Does and Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far! with the National Youth Theatre. In 2024 Khalil was nominated for a Black British Theatre Award for his sound design and composition work. Khalil most recently performed in Chadwick Boseman’s Deep Azure at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
Jonathan Caren said today:
“I always wanted Defy The Leader to be played by a real musician – someone who has lived the artistic life of the character. Khalil brings that from the inside. He moves seamlessly across genres and mediums, and because he’s playing a musician and designing the sound of the production, his presence will be woven into the entire piece in a fresh way. It’s exactly what the play is about: art as collaboration. You’ll feel his imprint everywhere.”
Josh Radnor is a filmmaker, actor, and musician best known for his nine-season run as the star of the Emmy-winning How I Met Your Mother. He wrote and directed two feature films (happythankyoumoreplease & Liberal Arts) both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the former winning the 2010 Audience Award. Recent TV: Hunters (opposite Al Pacino) and the critically acclaimed Fleishman Is in Trouble. On stage he most recently starred in the world premiere of Itamar Moses’ Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Ally at The Public Theater for which he received a Lucille Lortel nomination, Richard Greenberg’s The Babylon Line at Lincoln Center, and the Broadway production of Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Disgraced. He made his Broadway debut in 2002 in The Graduate opposite Kathleen Turner and Alicia Silverstone. He released two indie-folk albums with Aussie musician Ben Lee as Radnor & Lee. His releases as a solo artist include One More Then I’ll Let You Go, Eulogy: Volume 1 & Volume 2.
Noah Galvin is an actor, singer, writer, and producer. He wrote, produced, and starred in Theater Camp, which Noah co-wrote alongside Ben Platt, Molly Gordon, and Nick Lieberman. The musical comedy film premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and won the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble. For his role as ‘Glenn’, Noah received a Best Supporting Performance nomination at the 2024 Independent Spirit Awards. He was the second actor to star as Evan in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway, taking over from Ben Platt, whom he married in 2024. His other Broadway credits include Ogie in Waitress. He also starred in a one night only 50th anniversary concert of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at Lincoln Center. On TV’s The Good Doctor he played ‘Dr. Asher Wolke’.
Producers are Juliet Berman (Spiral Stairs Entertainment), Kater Gordon and BPM Theatrical.
Co-producers are Jessica Goldman Foung and Owen Drake.
General Management by James Steel Productions.
Photography by Emilio Madrid
Artwork design by Regular People
Creative Team
Jonathan Caren – Playwright
Daniel Bailey – Director
Set & Costume Designer Amelia Jane Hankin
Lighting Designer Laura Howard
Sound Designer Khalil Madovi
Original music by Ben Harper and CJ Harper
Jonathan Caren – Playwright
Jonathan Caren is an American playwright and screenwriter. He won multiple awards for The Recommendation (Ovation Best New Play, NAACP Award, Craig Noel Award/Old Globe), Canyon (directed by Whitney White ) and Need to Know. In TV, he has written for multiple shows including The Sinner, Boots & We Were The Lucky Ones, and is currently developing a pilot for HBO.
Daniel Bailey – Director
Director Daniel Bailey made his West End debut with the award-winning Red Pitch, which he originally directed at the Bush Theatre, and for which he received The Stage Debut Award for Best Creative West End Debut. Other directing work at the Bush Theatre includes Beru Tessema’s Wolves On Road, Lenny Henry’s August in England (co-directed with Lynette Linton), and Temi Wilkey’s The High Table (Stage Debut Award winner 2020).