White Rose The Musical
Marylebone Theatre • 27 February - 13 April
If you are already a fan of musical theatre, then it’s not inconceivable that White Rose has everything you could want or expect from the genre. Powerful songs with memorable hooks that carry the audience along on a journey that, in true theatrical tradition, is peppered with uplifting anthems and heartbreaking ballads. However, such a crowd-pleasing (and achingly commercial) soundtrack might not be quite so well received by lovers of historical drama given the book behind the soundtrack is the infinitely more fascinating true story of a small group of university students in Munich, Germany, who secretly met to write, print, and distribute leaflets exposing Hitler’s lies and Nazi deception. Both elements in this strange fusion of story and style have their merit, but I admit to having taken my seat with more than a hint of scepticism as to whether the subject matter and the stylistic approach could ever be anything other than the strangest of bedfellows.
That’s not to say that such a combination hasn’t worked in the past, as the ongoing success of Cabaret can attest too, but in White Rose the lyricist Brian Belding and composer Natalie Brice have opted for a somewhat more traditional soundtrack that, in it’s less inspiring moments, has more in common with American soft rock than anything approaching the originality or style of the music that might have been heard at the time, and the effect of this strange juxtaposition found me repeatedly lifted out of the story as each song began… and there are a lot of songs in this reworked version that has been extended beyond the one act duration of the original production that made its off broadway debut in 2024.
Fairing much better by way of creating a more conducive atmosphere is Justin Williams set design, whose two tier stage provides a ground level backdrop of distressed monochromatic concrete, the rubble at it’s base suggesting the ravishes of war on a once proud city where “Terror and fear have replaced culture and art”. This is impressively visualised by an imposing mezzanine walkway upstage that provides a platform from where the ominous presence of the Gestapo monitor the population below in search for dissidents, the White Rose of the musicals title being the name of the resistance group led by siblings Sophie Scholl (Collette Guitart), and her brother Hans, (Tobias Turley). Alex Musgrave’s lighting does much to add even more drama to this impressively brutalist set, but remaining as far as you can get from the more typical bright sets and colourful lighting usually associated with the sort of musical theatre repeatedly being suggested by Belding and Brice’s soundtrack, and it’s this increasing inconsistency in tone that ultimately proves to be the show’s achilles heal throughout.
The young cast are suitably energetic. Owen Arkrow (as Willi Graf) and Danny Whelan (as Christoph Probst) offer solid support as members of the White Rose, but lead Tobias Turley never quite manages to realise the gravitas of his role, whilst Collette Guitart’s relentless stoicism in the role of the headstrong but justly driven Sophie Scholl renders her performance a little one-note throughout. Will Nunziata manages to inject some much needed drama into the production, there being some genuinely impressive set pieces, but this too finds itself the unfortunate victim of some uncomfortably trite dialogue that only serves to amplify the brevity in the characters emotional responses to the situation they find themselves… Hans’s comment too his sister, “Some people don’t talk to their siblings when they grow up, yet here we are dying together”, feels clumsy and crass at best, especially considering the fate that awaits the two activists.
Whilst there’s no reason Belding and Brice can’t have a successful career in musical theatre, the weight and the gravity of the story they have chosen to tell with White Rose ultimately feels at odds with this creative couples particular skillset. All of that being said, it did at least make me aware of a story from history I had previously been unaware of, and arriving at London’s Marylebone Theatre at a time of such global political unrest, it can only be hoped that the likes of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose will once again appear when needed to help bring sanity to an insane world… just maybe without the music.
★★
White Rose The Musical is on at London’s Marylebone Theatre until 13th April. Tickets available here
review: Simon J. Webb
photography: Marc Brenner