Imagine This

The Warsaw ghetto, like those in Vilna and Lodz, had an orchestra. So following the example of Joshua Sobol’s far superior cabaret-style musical play Ghetto (seen at the National in 1989), the American creative team on the mawkish new show Imagine This have created a musical within a musical, “Masada”, performed by the oppressed inmates.

The major problem here is that once the situation of fierce resistance is established, there is nowhere for the characters to go except towards the exit. Timothy Sheader’s resourceful and often effective production attempts to create light and shade in deals with the Nazis, hints of betrayal and the shocking business of an informant bartering a fur cloak, sleeping with the enemy and being shot in the back for her pains.

But the book of Glenn Berenbeim, in creating a parallel story of the ghetto in 1942 with the tale of the defiant Jewish zealots committing mass suicide in the hill-top fortress of Masada above the Dead Sea, ends up being merely repetitive. It’s a double dose of sentimentality, plucky victims offering a show business metaphor in a sort of Roman follies without the wit, fun or melody of A Funny Thing Happened.

The show starts quietly with a toy carousel flickering to life as the optimistic Polish actors led by Peter Polycarpou’s Daniel savour the last day of summer. Sheader’s staging, and Liam Steel’s choreography, bring a whirl of false optimism to the sequence, and the grimness of the ghetto is starkly contrasted with the colourfulness of “Masada” on a neat, small revolve within Eugene Lee’s monumental warehouse-style design.

The angry, violent Nazis are doubled with rather camp, stomping Romans, and the ghetto love story between Daniel’s daughter Rebecca (Leila Benn Harris) and a half-Jewish resistance fighter Adam (Simon Gleeson) is echoed in the doomed romance of the Israeli first century Tamar and a smitten Roman soldier Silva played by the same actors. But the music and lyrics of Shuki Levy and David Goldsmith, while neat enough in a mediocre way, never rise to the impassioned authenticity of their obvious example in Les Miserables.

Polycarpou does his level best to hold the show together, and wins a round with his dark night of the soul (with Jewish jokes) number, “The Last Laugh”. Michael Matus shows up well as a good-natured clown and Cameron Leigh doubles as the fur coat informant (“Never look a gift whore in the mouth” is a line screaming for red pencil) and a voluptuous Salome in Masada, but this is to accentuate the positive in an engulfing sea of negative.

– Michael Coveney