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

HERE COMES J EDGAR!

★★★★

“the silliness of this play delights a willing house”

Monarchs Anonymous started as a YouTube sketch about history’s crowned heads dragged into group therapy. It’s a family production that has since grown into a fully staged comedy at The Other Palace. The premise alone is worth the ticket: a support group for history’s monarchs, the beheaded, the grandiose and the merely bored. The audience are co-opted into the session from the outset, donning cardboard crowns and reciting the group mantra, everyone a fellow sovereign. This lends the evening a cheerful complicity. While the concept has a near-bottomless mine of potential material, the script chooses to veer towards farce, playing to the gallery. That’s the intention. The audience laps it up.

The conceit is irresistible, and the acting is excellent. William Harry Mitchell’s Henry VIII clings to his emotional support weapon, Helena Devereux’s Marie Antoinette frets for more champagne, Joshua Poole’s Charles II can barely govern his libido, and George Eggay’s Mansa Musa I grumbles magnificently about being the least known of the rulers, yet the richest. The parade of sovereigns is a visual feast that earns its applause before a word is spoken (costumes by Kathy Brazier; theme music by Richard de Winter). There are some genuinely fine gags delivered with a knowing wink. The absent Tutankhamun, we are told, has gone back to his Mummy.

The show’s warm origin is palpable, built around a kitchen table by two generations of the same family running the Ceridwen Theatre Company: Nadia and Lyon Devereux co-wrote with Nadia’s husband Joshua Poole, Nadia also directs and plays Pam while her sister Helena takes Marie Antoinette, and their mother, Vivien Lesley Jones, production-manages.

The in-built issue of such productions is the need for outside editing. The script could be tightened. The opening overstays its welcome, circling the setup long after the audience have grasped it. The evening never reaches what it’s marketed as: the actual reckoning of these damaged, grandiose souls. Instead, the plot pivots on the machinations of the therapist, Dr Thompson, played by the historian Kat Marchant of YouTube’s Reading the Past. She acts very well, but her character is the least interesting figure in the room. The genuine psychoanalysis that is marketed as the beating heart of the piece is repeatedly deferred in favour of farce.

In the second half, the monarchs shed their robes and crowns for everyday wear, and the question sharpens: stripped of regalia, who are these people? Is a king without a kingdom simply a man with opinions and a grievance? Harriet Sharmini Smithers’s Sophia Duleep Singh (suffragette and exiled Punjabi princess) lands the idea most pointedly. There is another play hiding inside this one, a play that stops winking to the gallery and lets the premise breathe. And yet, perhaps this is the treatment monarchs deserve. The more the mystery is unveiled, the sillier our own royal family looks. Perhaps, behind the palace doors, this bickering and self-regard is all any of them amounts to.

Taken on its own terms, the silliness of this play delights a willing house. The crown, as it were, is slightly askew. It is still very much worth the audience.

Tag Archives: ELIZABETH BOTSFORD

HERE COMES J EDGAR!

★★★★

King’s Head Theatre

HERE COMES J EDGAR!

King’s Head Theatre

★★★★

“As history, it’s candy-coated; as theatre, it’s a joy: an immaculately performed comedy”