Jermyn Street Theatre | ★★★★✩
Not so nice Jewish boys Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (whose mother was actually Catholic) have been the subject of many a stage, screen and literary dramatisation inspired by their still-shocking crime committed in 1924 in their hometown of Chicago.
Most famous of these is Hitchcock’s Rope, based on Patrick Hamilton’s play. However, Stephen Dolginoff’s musical, first seen in New York in 2003, deserves to be up there among the best of the works spawned by the terrible climax to Leopold and Loeb’s thrill-seeking spree — the murder of a child.
Matthew Parker’s production recently put Islington’s Hope Theatre on the map and now it deservedly gets an extended life at Jermyn Street. Bart Lambert and Jack Reitman play the eponymous pair (respectively Leopold and Loeb) with an air of well-heeled superiority. They are like a darker, grotesque version of Niles and Frasier, except that Nathan and Richard are not brothers but lovers addicted to master and minion role-play.
Rachael Ryan’s design is a shadowy (excellent lighting by Chris McDonnell) space festooned with black and white photos connected by a latticework of red string. A superbly realised moment, in which the pictures are picked out by torch beams, later reveals that this is all evidence in a police investigation.
Dolginoff’s score is good, if lyrically rather laboured. However his book makes this show soar. The plot starts with Lambert’s ageing and imprisoned Leopold in a parole interview three decades or more after he was jailed. His unseen questioners know how the crime was committed, but they still do not know why. The prisoner’s answer, told mostly in flash-back, drives 80 riveting, uninterrupted minutes with Lambert discarding and donning decades of ageing as easily as a cardigan.
His youthful Leopold is devoted to Loeb’s superior Nietzsche-reading, self-declared “superman”. And even though it is Leopold who got into Harvard the submissive half of the duo places himself at the disposal of his idol who seeks thrills. Arson is followed by burglary as Loeb convinces Leopold that the two are not only above the law, but society.
Lambert and Reitman convey the descent into depravity without ever glorifying the monsters they make human. The scene in which Loeb, lit by the headlamps of his Ford Roadster, tempts his (unseen) 11-year-old victim into his car is as tender as it is terrifying. Thereafter Parker perfectly quickens the pace of his production as the net closes in on the increasingly nervous duo.
Seeing this musical so soon after the recently opened behemoth Moulin Rouge, I couldn’t help but compare the two shows. One is massive and spectacular yet vapid, the other is tiny, gripping and forensic in its portrayal of character and crime, serving up everything you could possibly want from an evening at the theatre.
