The Stage

Imagine This

Published Thursday 20 November 2008 at 11:35 by Mark Shenton

First the good news - it isn’t Springtime for Hitler. There’s no doubting the sincerity and effort, not to mention serious amount of money, that has gone into creating Imagine This, a new musical set in the Warsaw Ghetto of Nazi-occupied Poland.

It provides two history lessons for the price of one, as a spirited theatre company holed up within it recreate the story of Masada, in which an estimated 960 Jews in 70 AD held out in a hillside fortress against the Roman army, and eventually committed mass suicide rather than surrender. Glenn Berenbeim’s book creates strenuous, earnest parallels between this collective act of defiance and the position of the fictitious theatre company as they learn of plans to despatch their audience the next day to Treblinka.

But as the show cuts between the two stories, there’s not only some narrative confusion but insufficient character development to establish just who these people are and what the relationships between them all are. Most fatally for a musical, no characters are given individually defining musical voices, either, but instead the whole thing is drenched in a wash of generic melody and sugary ballads, courtesy of composer Shuki Levy, who seems to have been inspired by the triumphal marches of Les Miserables. Chris Walker’s orchestrations pump them up to paradoxically diminishing effect.

The cast, led by Peter Polycarpou as the head of the theatre company and a sweet-voiced Leila Benn Harris as his daughter who falls for Simon Gleeson’s resistance fighter (and, in the parallel story, a Roman soldier), work with commitment to animate it with as much conviction as possible.

Director Timothy Sheader and his choreographer Liam Steel keep things moving with pace and polish on Eugene Lee’s imposing, all-purpose set - a beautiful piece of theatrical engineering, but it is as generic as the music since it could equally service revivals of Oliver!, Sweeney Todd or Nicholas Nickleby. Unfortunately, the writing is equal to none of them.