Hoover? Damn!
Here Comes J Edgar! (The King's Head, Islington)
My second-favourite piece in legendary spoof news source The Onion (after 'Doritos Celebrate One Millionth Ingredient') concerns a provincial dentist expressing faint surprise that he, out of nowhere, has suddenly become an international gay icon.
Well, small town orthodontists are all very well, but THIS? J Edgar Hoover as a Pride month superstar? Surely not!
And yet I can picture the conversation. After all, it is hotly rumoured that the current upsurge in conspiracy theorists who literally believe the earth is flat was started by two friends for a bet, something very similar could have occurred here...
'So let's turn the most unlikely person possible into the gay icon to end all gay icons and make a musical about him which will run at London's foremost gay theatre, The King's Head...'
'The one above the pub?'
'No, it's a proper theatre now. Has its own building and everything. Not quite as big as the Almeida, but -'
'Oh, the one by Tony Blair's favourite restaurant, The Granita?'
'That shut down ages ago. It's a shop selling overpriced t shirts now. But anyway, who should we make our musical about?'
'Richard Nixon?'
'Bit obvious, isn't it?'
'How about J Edgar Hoover then? We can remind everyone that America being run by a far-right paranoid narcissist is nothing new...'
'You know, I think you're onto something.'
Well, I'm not sure if it happened quite like that but I reckon I'm pretty close. And this is a magnificent production. I would expect nothing else of something written by Harry Shearer who is, after all, Mr Burns on the Simpsons (together with Smithers and Ned Flanders) - coincidentally, Mr Burns, the play, opened at the Almeida, practically next door, some years ago - and brought to life by Mad Men's Bryan Batt as the FBI's former Director General himself.
It is superhumanly fantastic. Even Stephen Sondheim would lose sleep over the fact that he never wrote the lyric (sung by John Dillinger's lover, the Lady in Red) 'after a bank job, he likes a wank job'. The choreography cries out for a bigger stage - which I'm sure, after its debut here, it will receive - and is packed with musical theatre in-jokes, many of which I've probably missed (I did spot the second act opener riffing off My Fair Lady's Ascot Gavotte).
The ensemble cast is excellent beyond words. I loved Martha Pothen as a cynical nurse, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray just below the dying Hoover's oxygen supply, not to mention Alfie Parker, Ryan Heenan, Reuben Khan and Simon Anthony as FDR, Ike Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ respectively.
You will laugh till your sides ache and you're carted off by the House Unamerican Activities Committee.