If the secret of comedy is timing and location, location, location determines a property’s success, then the producers of Here Comes J. Edgar! are batting on a sticky wicket. How can it hit it out of the ball park in a country with no ball parks?
Okay, if London’s musical theatre fans can line up for singing cats in Regent’s Park - as they will from next week - will they do the same for a show about the tyrant who ran the FBI as a personal fiefdom from 1935 to 1972, told in the style of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective? A hard sell indeed.
But they have showbiz royalty onside. Harry Shearer (The Simpsons and Spinal Tap) and Tom Leopold (Seinfeld) are on writing duties and the score is by the late Peter Matz (who worked extensively with Barbra Streisand). They’ve also set up the UK debut of Bryan Batt (pictured below with Isobel Grace Bass) unforgettable as Salvatore Romano in Mad Men, and there’s even a little local stardust sprinkled by Eastenders’ Marc Elliott as Wlater Winchell. What more could we ask? Turns out, quite a bit.
Nevertheless, we do get a lot for our money, a big show continually threatening to burst out of the confines of its snug thrust stage. Indeed, wishing to take my mind off yet another Freudian Slip gag, I marvelled at how director, Josh Seymour, and choreographer, Bill Deamer, had jammed a chorus line of high-kicking FBI agents on to a few square yards of stage, four floors below Upper Street, for the titular number. Aspiring directors should venture down the King's Head's never-ending stairs for a masterclass in working on the fringe.
All this endeavour turns on one (disputed, but highly likely) element of J Edgar Hoover’s character - that he was gay. Lose that and he’s just another American gangster running his rackets on the inside and I think we’ve all seen enough of those in the last ten years or so.
Perhaps in the mid-90s, when this show started its 30 year odyssey from radio to this stage debut, that fact alone, with its attendant cover-up, was enough to prop up a two hour production, but it feels thin today.
There is more than a whiff of 1970s The Two Ronnies clinging to every scene, not just in the cross-dressing, but also in leaning into camp stereotypes for too much of the humour. This venue has an impeccable record of supporting LGBT+ theatre, so it’s not for me to parse gay taste, but, rather like Titanique, I found my laughter drying up very quickly, the reliance on a single hook groaning under the strain of carrying the show. But Titanique is a runaway global success, so there’s a huge audience roaring in the stalls, even if I’m not.
Perhaps that one-trick pony approach to the comedy is a blessing in disguise because it prevents our examining the tone of the production in any great detail. Batt lends his considerable charisma to Hoover and it is impossible not to sympathise with a man required to live a public life at odds with his private life, but it’s J. Edgar Hoover FFS!.
There are many touching moments with his private lover, sorry, public lifelong assistant, Clyde Tolson, not entirely undermined by Hugo Bolton going full John Inman as Mr Humphries in his characterisation. We find ourselves warming to the undercover couple, even as they dispatch their personal paramilitary on to the streets to settle vendettas, take bribes openly and suborn presidents. You keep hearing alarm bells in your head and envisioning a neon sign flashing THE EPSTEIN FILES every time another corrupt act is portrayed and then - if you can muster it - you’re laughing five minutes later.
Okay - park that. The singing is excellent and many of the MGM-inflected songs fall in the sweet spot between parody and homage. "I’ll Never Miss Him" is a poignant duet between Hoover and Tolson presaging a brief, if traumatic, separation and Laura Medforth goes all-in with "Helen’s Blues", as the secretary, so long strung along, who believes she may have turned her boss at last. Luke Holman’s band are super and Tom Paris’s costumes are beautiful to behold and witty too.
Perhaps my patience ebbs, perhaps the questions of why here and why now nag too much, but most likely the sheer underlying obnoxiousness of our protagonist overwhelms, as the second half proves much less fun than the first. Even a meta reference on stage to that dropping off - like Freudian slips, a little meta goes a long way - can’t help us wanting to see the hospital bed return from its framing device opening scene, a bravura start that got the biggest laugh of the night!
Which is a bit of a pity, because there is a good comedy musical to be written about Hoover, indeed you can see many of its components in this show. But it needs to be much darker than this one, ease back on the star’s winning rizz coming close to an apologia and nail the monster for who he really was and the legacy / example he left behind. Satire has to bite - this one smooches.
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