★★★★

“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.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

Barbican

★★★★★

“Fein’s direction and Julia Cheng’s muscular choreography is marked by sublime precision”

In its Barbican transfer, director Jordan Fein’s revelatory Fiddler on the Roof retains the elemental power that made it a five-star phenomenon in Regent’s Park. He strips the beloved 1964 musical of its nostalgic veneer to expose something more potent and contemporary: a raw and resonant meditation on tradition, displacement, and the endurance of community.

Fun, too, in case there should be a misunderstanding. Great fun.

Set in 1905 in the menaced Jewish shtetl of Anatevka before the Russian revolution, Fiddler follows Tevye, a weary but devout milkman, as his five daughters begin to choose love over arranged marriage, and the outside world encroaches upon his way of life.

Anchored by songs like Tradition, If I Were a Rich Man, and Sunrise, Sunset, it’s long been cherished for its warmth and wit. But Fein’s version – subtly but decisively restaged – asks more interesting and topical questions too: what happens when the traditions that once sustained a community begin to fracture under the weight of change? What is the true impact of displacement, of a people menaced from their homes?

Where the musical was once critiqued as “shtetl sentimentalism,” this staging leans into pared-down grit, stoic humour, and haunting lyricism. There is a modern feel to the witty script – and to the resolutely ambiguous ending.

Tom Scutt’s gorgeous design is emblematic of the approach: instead of quaint rooftops, we see cornstalks uprooted and suspended above the stage, evoking both harvest and trauma. The titular fiddler (a magnetic Raphael Papo) becomes not just a symbol but a shadowy companion, echoing Tevye’s inner world with eerie cadenzas and an eventual duet with Hannah Bristow’s Chava – whose marriage outside the faith breaks her father’s beleaguered heart.

The huge cast is potent, using impressive numbers to magnificent effect, a dream sequence appearing like a fully-realised Hollywood dance number. Meanwhile, Adam Dannheisser’s Tevye is no grandstanding showman but a wry, tired father trying – and failing – to hold his family together through reason, prayer, and rueful monologues. His comedic timing is sharp and he plays out with great relish the classic sitcom paradigm of the father and husband who declares his dominance only to have it slyly eroded by the headstrong women around him.

But it’s his gentleness that resonates most, particularly opposite Lara Pulver’s commanding Golde, whose grounded and wary pragmatism keeps the domestic scenes taut and touching.

Fein’s direction and Julia Cheng’s muscular choreography is marked by sublime precision. The Bottle Dance at Tzeitel’s wedding is performed under a canopy that rises and falls. On top of that precarious canopy, and ominous, the fiddler makes clear that everything is poised on the brink of a mighty disaster. The Russians are coming.

The cast functions as a true community, especially in the spine-tingling finale as they sing Anatevka, their voices braided with longing, resilience, and bitter clarity. In a final image, the toppled milk cart, beautifully lit, appears like an oil painting. Everywhere, indeed, there is beauty and catastrophe.

One of Fein’s many achievements lies in his refusal to oversell modern parallels. The production trusts its audience to make the connections – to recognise in Anatevka’s forced dispersal the long shadow of global displacement. It neither moralises nor rants; it simply tells the story with integrity and emotional intelligence.

For all its sumptuous visual invention and musical flair, Fiddler is most powerful in its silences: a father cut off from his daughter, a community carrying candles into the dark, a fiddler playing an aching lament.

Tag Archives: Simon Anthony

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”

HERE COMES J EDGAR!

King’s Head Theatre

Reviewed on 16th July 2026

by Elizabeth Botsford

Photography by Mark Douet

HERE COMES J EDGAR!

HERE COMES J EDGAR!

HERE COMES J EDGAR!

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

★★★★★

Barbican

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

Barbican

★★★★★

“Fein’s direction and Julia Cheng’s muscular choreography is marked by sublime precision”