Singin' in the ghetto

Is the story of Jews trapped in the Warsaw ghetto really a fit topic for a musical? And do the Nazis get to sing? Tanya Gold goes behind the scenes at an unlikely West End show

Poll: A suitable subject for a musical?
Imagine This
Rehearsals of Imagine This at the New London Theatre. Photograph: Linda Nylind

In Imagine This, a new musical about the Holocaust, a group of actors in the Warsaw ghetto stage a play. The play is about a community of Jews in Masada who, in AD73, are surrounded by the Roman army and, rather than surrender, choose to kill themselves en masse. "With rumours of the Final Solution in the air," the press release says, "their play merges with the reality they are trying to escape and a dramatic love story unfolds." Ah. It is dead Jew piled on dead Jew, with song, and it is coming to a major West End venue in London. I absolutely have to go down and examine it. Will it be Springtime for Hitler, without the irony?

  1. Imagine This
  2. New London theatre,
  3. London
  4. WC2B 5PW
  1. Starts November 19
  2. Box office:
    0870 890 0141
  3. Venue website

The New London theatre looks like a 1960s government department, a glass and concrete block that seems to have fallen on to Covent Garden. Standing outside is a small, chain-smoking redhead. "I am Monica, the company manager," she says, and leads me into a tiny lift and up to the auditorium. The stage has been decorated to look like a ghetto, and it matches the exterior of the theatre perfectly: a concrete floor, broken windows, an iron staircase. The cast are standing around, dressed as ancient Romans, looking overwhelmed. When they are asked to do something, they spring up as if they have been electrocuted.

I say hello to the producer. Beth Trachtenberg is an elderly Jewish woman, round and blond and Florida-sun wrinkled. We go out to the foyer and sit on a squashy sofa. "This," she says in a creaking American accent, "is not a musical about the Holocaust. It does not take place in the camps. The Warsaw ghetto was the last great flowering of Jewish culture in Poland. There were half a million people surrounded by death, but even in the midst of this they laughed and they danced." From the auditorium I can hear an actor shouting: "Caesar awaits you in Rome!"

"Twenty-five years ago," Beth says, "no one would have thought that a man stealing a loaf of bread would become the subject of the most beloved musical of all time - Les Misérables. This will live on in people's minds and people's hearts." She sounds as if she might at any moment break into song. I look around. On the wall is a rehearsal schedule. It says: "10.15: Mr Neal and Mr Serlin into crucifixion costumes."

Monica delivers actors to me. They come off stage, smile, look exhausted, insist the musical isn't really about the Holocaust - oh, no, no, no, no, no - and retreat. Simon Gleeson, the young romantic lead, sits next to me in the auditorium. In the Masada play, he plays a Roman who falls in love with the daughter of a rebel and they sing a song called I Surrender. The lyrics go: "The sacred fortress of your love is home to me/ For only locked inside your arms can I be free."

Simon is tall and West End-handsome. He has a very square face and is wearing a leather jerkin. "God, it's hot in this armour," he says. He seems anxious, as if I'm about to point my self-righteous Jewish finger at him and say: "You are making a musical about the Holocaust, called We Will Shoot You." Chewing his lip, he says: "I am worried about guns going off at weird times."

I stalk him to his meeting with Glenn Berenbeim, who wrote the book for the show. Glenn is a small intellectual wearing a cap. He is about to give Simon notes. The meeting goes like this ...

Glenn (soothingly): "No one has been a human being to you in years, and how human beings instinctively treat each other overtakes you - in the same way that I believe the love overtakes you. You are not an actor who comes on wanting to display everything he's got. You are not an emotional show-off."

Simon (pouting and slightly despairing): "Some people call it wooden."

I turn to Glenn, who immediately tells me he invited Barbra Streisand to his Bar Mitzvah. "My parents told me I could invite anyone I wanted, so I invited Barbra Streisand. I addressed the invitation to Barbra Streisand, Hollywood. She didn't come but she sent me a signed photo."

Seven years ago, Glenn heard a musical score about the Jews of Masada. He didn't think it was commercial enough, so he relocated it to the Warsaw ghetto, as a play within a play, like a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney, let's-put-on-a-show piece, only with a slightly higher body count. Glenn taps his fingers on the script and talks about The Sound of Music. The cast and crew talk about The Sound of Music all the time, because it's The Other Nazi Musical, and it was a hit. "No one remembers the Nazis in The Sound of Music," Glenn says. "What they remember was that the musical was about something bigger than the enemy without. It was about the hope and the solution within."

Glenn makes a list of musicals with dark themes that worked. He counts them until he runs out of fingers, while I pitch in: Miss Saigon (Vietnam), Cabaret (Nazis), The Sound of Music (more Nazis), Fiddler on the Roof (pogroms), Sweeney Todd (cannibalism), West Side Story (gang warfare), Guys and Dolls (addiction), The Phantom of the Opera (disfigurement), Jesus Christ Superstar (the actual death of Christ).

Steven Serlin is one of two Jews in the cast. His original family name, he tells me cheerfully, means "bad cabbage" in German. He looks like Bob Dylan, if Dylan dressed up as a Roman and sang: "They come famished, they come frightened, they come shaken and upset/ But whatever we imagine, no Messiah's shown up yet." "It isn't about the Holocaust," he says. "It's pre-Holocaust."

He tells me about the dog that was fired. He explains that they staged Imagine This in Plymouth last year as a taster, and a german shepherd was cast. "But he got fired," says Steven, "because he kept barking at inappropriate moments." Monica arrives with the leading lady, Leila Benn Harris, who sings I Surrender with Simon. She looks like a smaller Sophia Loren and doesn't just cry over the material - she has nightmares. "We are using toy guns in rehearsal," she says. "I have to pretend to be afraid of a man with a toy gun."

Next I find David Goldsmith, the lyricist, in the auditorium pacing up and down. He looks like Glenn's twin and admits they have a mountain to climb, putting on a commercial musical "about the Holocaust". He stops, looks horrified, and corrects himself: "About the Masada story that takes place in the Warsaw ghetto ..." Moving his head from side to side quizzically, he adds: "We have quite a lot of dead Jews, and it is the last thing you would do if you wanted to make a killing in musical theatre. But we believe in it."

Finally I force myself to ask the question I have been putting off since I arrived: do the Nazis sing? Do they sing: "Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party!"

David pouts. "No, no, no, no, no," he says. In the distance, the cast are singing a song about Jews to the tune of Greased Lightning. It's not in the show. They are warming up their vocal cords. "Go, Jews, lightning," they sing. David clutches his Imagine This badge and mutters: "I don't think anybody wanted to hear the Nazis sing".

Imagine This opens at the New London Theatre on November 19. Box office: 0844 412 4654.

Latest reviews

Today in pictures

  • sports peronality 2012

    BBC Sports Personality of the Year – in pictures

  • Martin Parr's M Video Christmas party photograph

    Dinner, dusk and dancing Russians: my best winter shot


    Monkey adopts kitten – in pictures
