Review: In ‘Somebody Somewhere,’ Home Is Like No Place - The New York Times

Sam’s road to finding a new home in her hometown begins when she befriends Joel (Jeff Hiller), a colleague at the test center who, she learns, was in high school show choir with her.

(“It’s all good,” he says. “A lot of people don’t remember me.”) When Joel invites her to “Choir Practice” — a semi-sanctioned cabaret soiree that draws gay residents and other free spirits from the community, held after-hours in a mall church — she begins to find her voice and her place, as well as to untangle the hidden mess within her own family.

Set in Everett’s hometown, Manhattan, Kan., “Somebody Somewhere” was created by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, who wrote for “High Maintenance,” a high-THC study of oddball Brooklynites.

There are the outsiders and showboats at Choir Practice, which is M.C.’ed by the charismatic Fred Rococo (the comedian and drag king Murray Hill), who heads a university soil-science department by day; farm families like Sam’s, with her even-keeled father and a mother who hides a drinking habit (Jane Brody); and people like Sam and Joel, deep into their 40s and still figuring out what their lives might be.

There are religious people and queer people and blue-collar people and creative people, and above all there is the recognition that none of those categories need be mutually exclusive.

Everett and Hiller have a winning friend-chemistry, and “Somebody Somewhere” is generous enough to let him shine.

When Sam finally takes the stage at Choir Practice, “Somebody Somewhere” reveals itself as something more sweet than bitter

She performs Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up,” a number from her high school choir glory days, and Joel — a shy guy who blooms into a showman onstage behind the keyboard — takes the Kate Bush part of the duet