King's Head Theatre

This lightweight musical about the very ‘complicated’ FBI director J Edgar Hoover – who dominated America’s 20th century,  serving for 48 years – began life as a 1994 radio play starring Kelsey Grammar. Exactly how it ended up making its stage debut 32 years later at an off-West End theatre in Islington I am fairly unclear. But on some level it’s obviously something to do with the big name creative team: Harry Shearer (of The Simpsons and Spinal Tap), Tom Leopold (a writer for Cheers and Seinfeld) and Peter Matz (Barbra Streisand’s musical director, who died in 2002). Given Shearer – who seems to be the driving force behind this production – reputedly makes $300,000 per episode of The Simpsons, it’s not hard to imagine he’s thrown a bit of his own cash at a musical that – while modestly sized – is as big a show as the King's Head Theatre has ever staged. It even has a bona fide US star in the form of Bryan Batt (aka Mad Men’s Salvatore Romano) who plays Hoover. The man was infamous for harvesting kompromat on people he wanted to blackmail, (or people he might want to blackmail one day,) or whose love lives he was just generally interested in. He’s also alleged to have been a closeted gay man and crossdresser: there isn’t really hard public domain evidence for this, especially the crossdressing bit, but certainly he was a ‘confirmed bachelor’ who never married and lived with fellow agent Clyde Tolson, so, er, go figure. The musical goes all in on the idea that Hoover was...