Review: HERE COMES J EDGAR!, King's Head Theatre
This comedy musical has its world premiere
During his near-half century leading the FBI, J Edgar Hoover used illegal surveillance techniques on thousands of Americans allegedly connected with communism, curbed the influence of civil rights leaders, and caused damage to the US labour movement from which it has never recovered. A high-camp comedy musical about this sinister figure’s life, then, may seem like a tall order.
Here Comes J Edgar! begins with Edgar (Mad Men’s Bryan Batt, amping up the repressed melancholy) on his deathbed, in a variant of It’s A Wonderful Life, with a younger version of himself guiding him back through his past choices. As he ascends up the ranks of the nascent American security service, blackmailing several presidents along the way, Edgar meets and falls in love with young agent Clyde Tolson (Hugo Bolton, with a vicious side-eye), whom he makes his “lifetime assistant”. The stage is set for unrepentant evil and a lot of Fosse-style choreography.
A crack team has been assembled for this – writers Harry Shearer and Tom Leopold have credits on The Simpsons and Seinfeld, and they’re using music from the late Streisand collaborator Peter Matz – and director Josh Seymour keeps the production tight and controlled in a small space. But the concept is flawed. Edgar’s scenes with Tolson are saccharine and portray them as a bickering old married couple; declarations like “without you, crimefighting is just a job” teeter on the edge of bad taste.
Edgar is a figure of ridicule, but often the joke seems to be on his sexuality rather than on his crimes; there are a few too many references to muscle magazines and not liking sports. There’s a comparison to be made here with Broadway hit Oh! Mary and its cabaret deconstruction of the past, but Hoover is surely too controversial and too recent a figure for that approach, where absurdity is used to take the notion of ‘history’ off its pedestal.
In the second act, though, Here Comes J Edgar! does begin to find its stride. As Edgar solidifies his long-term influence in the US government, we hear from a chorus of four former presidents, all lamenting that they could’ve done more to curb his autocratic power but they had “bigger fish to fry”. More could have been done with this conceit, and it’s a sign of the tight satire Shearer and Leopold are capable of.
More broadly, the writing is suddenly sharper in the second act, more willing to let Edgar show the blind spots in his thinking. There is a naked honesty to Edgar realising he cannot personally suffer from state-sanctioned homophobia when “I’m the only person who persecutes people like me”, and the show needed more lines like this. When Tolson confronts Edgar over the FBI’s harassment of Martin Luther King Jr, and admits he’s always enjoyed Edgar’s amoral doggedness, their romantic dynamic finally starts to make sense.
It’s also not a coincidence that Shearer and Leopold’s humour starts cutting deeper as Edgar descends into villainy. An (alleged) real-life evening where Hoover cross-dressed with McCarthy ally Roy Cohn becomes a musical number where these deeply homophobic men in drag sing that they “love being men”. When the conservatism these men have promoted starts to be used against them, the bones of the satire slot into place.
Satire of this kind must walk the fine line between lampooning those behind historic evils and accidentally making them sympathetic. Here Comes J Edgar! is a reminder of how difficult it is to get this right, but, mercifully, it gets there in the end.
Here Comes J Edgar! plays at the King's Head Theatre until 16 August
Photo credits: Mark Douet
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