HERE COMES J EDGAR!
King’s Head Theatre
★★★★
“As history, it’s candy-coated; as theatre, it’s a joy: an immaculately performed comedy”
The all-singing, all-dancing Here Comes J. Edgar! lifts the veil on what secrets a man must keep to satiate the power of love and the love of power.
J. Edgar Hoover was the most feared man in twentieth-century America. Founder of the modern FBI, he was the blackmailer-in-chief whose filing cabinets kept a succession of presidents awake at night. Here Comes J. Edgar! gives him the full Technicolor musical comedy treatment. This is the Disneyfied version of the Hoover story: the surveillance, the secret files, the whispers about his ‘life-time assistant’, about dresses and strands of pearls, all rendered in the bright, brassy idiom of golden-age Broadway. The point is made that his own underworld connections led to the FBI shifting focus from organized crime to ‘anti-Communism’. The audience can join the dots regarding how that might have contributed to modern America’s underbelly. But the show would much rather you tapped your foot. Mostly, you can’t resist.
The pedigree is extraordinary. Book and lyrics are by Harry Shearer (This Is Spinal Tap, The Simpsons) and Tom Leopold (Seinfeld, Cheers), with music by the late Peter Matz, arranger of Barbra Streisand’s early albums and musical director of The Carol Burnett Show. The evening gives ‘mid-century Broadway heyday’ in spades thanks to director Josh Seymour and Olivier-winning choreographer Bill Deamer. The intimate King’s Head auditorium turns it up close and personal.
At the centre, making his London debut, Bryan Batt is outstanding. Best known as Mad Men’s Salvatore Romano, Batt is a Broadway veteran, and it shows. His Hoover is preening, vain, dangerous and yet touching, a monster who believes himself to be the hero. Batt relishes the part.
He is surrounded by a great ensemble. Hugo Bolton makes a devoted, wounded Clyde Tolson. Marc Elliott rattles through Walter Winchell’s staccato gossip with glee; Laura Medforth veers between poise and barely restrained sexual frustration as Helen Gandy, keeper of the files; and Judith Owen brings smoky authority to the Lady in Red. The production looks a treat (set, Sophia Pardon; costumes, Tom Paris; lighting, Jamie Platt; sound, Nick Lodge), all sequinned with a G-man’s edge.
Matz’s score is generous to a fault: the numbers keep coming. The pastiche is affectionate and expertly built. Ben Ferguson’s orchestrations keep it all fizzing. However, ballad is laid upon ballad to the point where a red editing pen could be deployed to good effect. The other issue keeping the fifth star locked in the filing cabinet is the lack of a single showstopper to send you out, humming along Upper Street.
But what timing for the show’s opening! The machine created by J. Edgar Hoover has surfaced in the rumour mill’s eerily similar functioning surrounding another powerful, long-standing, homophobic American political figure who died last week. Indeed, an American musical this pointed taking its world premiere in Islington rather than New York may be the evening’s driest joke of all.
As history, it’s candy-coated; as theatre, it’s a joy: an immaculately performed comedy.
HERE COMES J EDGAR!
King’s Head Theatre
Reviewed on 16th July 2026
by Elizabeth Botsford
Photography by Mark Douet
