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So in a fluke of programming, three new musicals opened in London at off West End venues in the space of a week. I happen to be seeing them on three consecutive nights and I am going to review all three of them for you right here. Right now. We are talking Cable street at the Malvern Theatre. We are talking Beautiful Little fool at the Southwark Playhouse Borough and we are talking Ballad Lines. That's upside down ballad lines at Southwark Playhouse. Elephant. Let's talk about some off West End new musicals, shall we? But before we do. Oh my God. Hey. Welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to those of you listening to this triple bill of theatrical coverage on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre as you could probably tell by the fact that I spent my week seeing three back to back new musicals. I am a professional theatre critic here on social media as well as a content creator and I'm going to be sharing with you my thoughts about each of these shows. If you have had the chance to see any of them, I either during these current runs or during previous runs. For those not making their world premiere, then let us all know what you thought of them in the comments section down below. If you'd like to hear more of my reviews about other musicals, about plays, things happening in London, in New York, then make sure to subscribe here on YouTube or follow me on podcast platforms. The first has already had a couple of off West End runs previously. This is an updated version of Cable Street, a story about the historic riots that took place in the face of rising fascism in 20th century London are coming to together of various different cultural communities. This is a big story being told on a small stage. Then we have Beautiful Little Fool. This is American written but being produced here in London, and it tells the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote such novels as the Great Gatsby, but really also the story of his wife Zelda and their relationship as recalled through the eyes of their daughter. It's got a very contemporary rock and roll score. And finally, down the street at the other Southwark Playhouse, the newer of the two Southwark Playhouse Elephant we have ballad line this was previously a musical called A Mother's Song. I think it's been slightly reworked and it tells an intergenerational story of female choice and motherhood as well as a sort of story running beneath that about the journey of music and musical styles from one continent to another. So lots of exciting stories, lots of exciting music, lots for us to dig into today. Here are my thoughts about each of these. So the first of these shows which I saw this week was Cable Street. This is currently playing at the Marylebone Theatre in London and it depicts the battle of Cable street which took place in October 1936 in east London. A series of confrontations and obstructions and violent altercations between the residents of that area and their supporters and the police and a scheduled fascist march. And immediately we can have a conversation about the acute, unfortunate, painful relevance of a piece like this which renders it absolute, absolutely essential in the current socio political climate here in the uk. Very much so. With the rise of reform and anti immigration messaging and social division and all of these frustrating, pointless, hateful, terrible things, but also on the world stage entirely in talking about and depicting this event, the show digs in to anti Semitism and fascism and the nature of indoctrination and recruitment and the kind of isolated, desperate individuals who could be lied to and manipulated in order to persuade them to join the ranks of the then buf. But one of my favourite things about the show is it's also a very satisfyingly intersectional overview of that entire time and that entire neighborhood which constituted multiple diaspora. And with Irish immigrant and Jewish families living side by side in the show, literally within the same building. As Neighbours, we are acquainted with a trio of protagonists, each of whom, critically, is experiencing a very similar struggle, though they are sort of. Each led to believe that the other may be their enemy. And I think it's really important to tell a story like this from those different perspectives and with regards to multiple different communities who came together. That's the entire point of the Battle of Cable street, is that it wasn't just based on one community rising up against oppression. It was a true collaboration, the likes of which ought to inspire us today. But also it's just as important to represent those communities as not being monolithic. And there is divide within each of these households about what the right thing is to do and how they should respond to this announced fascist march that's going to parade down their street. The battle itself not taking place until the second act. There is an awful lot of exposition, a lot of character development that needs to happen in the first. We need to establish and instill all of the tension that is going to build ahead of this confrontation, which structurally, I think, is a very good decision. The show has this massive challenge on its hands in terms of representing this battle and this thing of scale and all of these different communities in an off West End venue with a, you know, relatively speaking, a small cast, in terms of the scale of what it's trying to achieve. It reminds me of shows like Ragtime, which sort of bring multiple different communities, multiple different sub ensembles, I guess, of a company into conversation on stage, and always works best on an epic scale. Gale. The score, by the way, has been written by Tim Gilvin, the book by Alex Kanefsky. I think both are brilliant. There's a really winning song that we meet early on in the first act called what Next? It's up there with some of the best new British standalone musical theatre songs that I think we've heard in the last decade. This is sung by the character of Mairead, the young Irish woman, and it represents, I think, some of the score's best qualities. It is rousing and defiant, but also very uplifting. Tim Gilvin does a great job of creating aspiration and despair in turn. And there are moments when this has to be handled very deftly because. And this is a really interesting thing, I think, to consider. There is the character of a young man who is very much welcomed into the BUF and seduced by the attractive ideas of fascism to a young man such as himself, played in this run by the brilliant Barney Wilkinson very, very well. And he sings they let me in. And how meaningful that is to him to have been welcomed and embraced at a challenging time of his life. And so he's singing about it very positively. And the tune is buoyant and positive, and the orchestration is buoyant and positive. And we as the audience know that this is a bad thing. But the song which is born out of his mind, you know, he does the thing of. He starts singing because he can no longer speak. And it's a triumphant emotion for him, is dictated by his own positive feeling about it. He just sees this as a great thing in that moment. He doesn't see the reality of it for what it is. He doesn't know that he's being deceived. And so the question should the orchestration be pursuant to how he truly feels, or should the orchestration reflect the show's overall perspective or the audience's perspective, or what we ought to be feeling about that song in that moment? The brilliant solution to which is to conclude the thing with this ominous, quiet ending that does not have a little button so the audience doesn't applaud. It just sort of hangs there. He presents it joyfully, and then we have to consider what that means to him and decide for ourselves that Think is a great choice and a big improvement for this run. I was also much more convinced by the rap delivery this time around. The young Jewish character whose name, oh, his father calls him Shmuley Sammy, he calls himself, he has a lot of anachronistic rap vocal, which I gather is meant to speak to sort of his sensation, to do something new and break away from family tradition. And this energy that he had. It's kind of getting to a similar point that the music of Hamilton is. And it also sort of speaks to the contemporary resonance of the show, even though it's taking place, gosh, almost a hundred years ago. He's played very convincingly by Isaac Grin. I should also mention that Lizzy Rose Essen Kelly plays Mairead, this leading trio in this production, really fantastic and brilliant together as they sort of experience their lives in parallel and then come together and move apart and come back together again. And there's an awful lot that Cable street gets right. I think there are also a handful of challenges with which it is still contending. This idea of scale being one of them. We have a lot of mulch multi rolling within the ensemble cast, which isn't always necessarily effective. It's also one sided because, and I don't know that people consider this very often because it's something we see a lot. We have a lot of female presenting performers playing male roles by adopting a gruff voice and putting a hat on. But we never see male identifying performers playing female roles that I could notice. And so all it really serves to do is undermine the threat and seriousness of some of the police characters and also the members of the buf. I also have something of an issue with the framing device. I like the idea of it very much. A woman from America arrives to a tour of East London trying to connect to the birthplace of her late mother. The tour guide is deeply passionate about the area because it was the home of his uncle. You can maybe see the direction that this is ultimately heading in. But he's also lamenting constantly the fact that most of the tour groups around the area are doing like Jack the Ripper inspired tours rather than authentic, meaningful history. The problem with this is the way that it's framed to us because she arrives, telling him vaguely why she's there, and then about a dozen people show up simultaneously from either side of the stage, all of them going, oh, sorry, well, there's traffic, whatever. In the most unconvincing arrival I think I have ever seen. And unfortunately I realized that this was the entire cast. And we are going to see this tour group sort of reappear as a framing for the show as we continue. And I thought to myself, there is no way you're gonna have the whole cast available next time you do this. So the size of this group is going to fluctuate. And it does. But it's not just that. We see a Jack the Ripper tour at one point that has far fewer participants, which very much flies in the face of this tour guide's complaints. He sees it and again, he laments that it's happening. And he's like, people used to want to come here to find out where their parents lived. And I'm like, yes, two of your larger tour still want to do that. They told you about it before. Even if half of them have disappeared. I think the wonderful Adam Lanson, who has developed and directed this piece has done a fantastic job of establishing character and the emotional trajectory of the entire thing with all of its various interconnectivity. It's a very challenging story. To tell it has this sort of sprawling quality, but I think it gets character really right. I would love for the show to attain something more of a specific visual storytelling identity and to make a slightly firmer decision about where it stands on satire, because there are a handful of characters who enter singing newspaper headlines in the styles of those newspapers. And that's fine if that's the only sort of satirical aside that we're going to have. The song sung by the BUF when they introduce themselves in a sort of an Operation Mincemeat esque boy band style with overhead pink lighting, really flies in the face of the rest of the show tonally. And I just don't think we need to hear those characters sing, especially so insincerely. That being said, we do get some beautiful moments of honesty and sincerity throughout the rest of the show. I could take or leave the Like Bread and Roses song that kind of interrupts the pace of the first act, but there is one in the second. Only Words was the real astonishing highlight moment of the show, I think, which is a song sung by Sammy's father as he advises caution and to, you know, not put himself in the line of danger in the approaching events. There are an abundance of things to take away from a story like this, from a show like Cable street, especially at the current moment. I think this is essential viewing for everybody right now. Go and check it out. At the Marylebone Theatre, they are doing something.