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 gay – he’s portrayed as a camp, frivolously self-absorbed man who spent his time in charge of the FBI locked in one endless lovers’ tiff with Hugo Bolton’s Tolson
Making Hoover look silly and effete is a big part of the point here, because it’s so far from his projected tough-guy image. But here’s the thing: the writers of this Here Comes J Edgar Hoover are elderly Americans who would remember Hoover personally (and were certainly heavily influenced by a 1993 book named The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover that’s the source for the cross-dressing allegations).
In the London of 2026, at an LGBT-learning theatre venue, the musical simply doesn’t do enough to bring us up to speed on Hoover’s public image or the real harms he did. Yeah, you get the impression he wasn’t a good egg. You probably know that already. But Hoover is never going to be to us what he is to Harry Shearer, or at least not without a lot of framing. If anything its use of gay stereotypes feels icky at times.
Batt’s Hoover – while entertaining – mostly just seems like a trivial man whose most egregious crime was blackmailing a series of presidents into letting him stay in his job a long time (which I’d suggest isn’t that bad – it’s not like he wrecked their lives). Otherwise he’s venal but mostly harmless and the musical is effectively an odd-couple love story about the blithely self-absorbed Hoover and the tightly wound Tolson. Squint a bit and you could even find yourself rooting for them. It never really makes the point that Hoover specifically victimised gay people, and he never experiences a moment of introspection about anything he does.
Josh Seymour’s production is too flimsy to have been West End worthy, I’d say, but in the intimate King’s Head it undoubtedly has its charms. There are some decent jokes, Matz’s retro Golden Age-style showtunes are big and bright, there are some fun flourishes to Sophia Pardon’s flexible, vaguely mid-century set, and Batt is charismatic and relentlessly game about a role he must surely on some level have taken on as a favour. Is this a good satire on J Edgar Hoover? Maybe if you have very strong preconceptions of him. But portraying him as a sort of loveable queer rogue sells everyone short.
