A Letter to Harvey Milk – Waterloo East Theatre

A Letter to Harvey Milk continues at the Waterloo East Theatre, London until 3 July 2022.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

Any musical with Harvey Milk namechecked in the title must seem like a shoo-in for Pride Month. The first openly gay man elected to office in California when he was voted in to San Francisco’s Board of Governors, Milk was forthright about his homosexuality and the need to break down prejudice so that young people of any sexual orientation or identity could feel safe.

After he was assassinated alongside San Francisco mayor George Moscone in November 1978, Milk has become synonymous with LGBTQIA+ rights. Which is why this musical, based on the short story of the same name by Lesléa Newman, is such an oddity in that it demotes the titular Milk to an ineffectual supporting character in an engaging, but very different, tale.

Barry James’ Harry is a retired kosher butcher and recent widower in San Francisco, who stumbles into a writing class at his local seniors centre. As he uses writing to unlock some long-forgotten memories – including the titular letter, written to the man who would always pop into his butcher’s shop looking for a signature on yet another petition – Harry and Barbara, the young Jewish woman teaching the class (Josselyn Ryder) form an unlikely familial bond.

As with Newman’s original story, perhaps the greatest emphasis of the musical is on Jewish identity. Harry rarely lets a sentence go buy without slipping into Yiddish, whereas Barbara was brought up in a Connecticut family who taught her to suppress her Jewish self to avoid harassment.

The pair’s unlikely friendship is accompanied by Carol Ball as the spirit of Frannie, Harry’s late wife. The songs (music by Laura I. Kramer, lyrics by Ellen M. Schwartz) rely heavily on the loving bickering between husband and wife, to the extent that all interactions between Harry and Frannie take on a similar tone throughout. Both James and Ball load their singing with heaps of character, and while that does occasionally harm the intelligibility of their vocals one is never in doubt as to the nature and intent of every syllable.

As Barbara, in her first stage role since graduating, Ryder combines a warm vulnerability with a beautiful singing voice. Numbers where she gets to take centre stage are rare – she is much more often playing support to James’ hesitant, weaker voice – but are always welcome.

Saddled with being a side character in an old man’s recollections, Joshua Anthony-Jones struggles to make Harvey Milk’s appearances convey the meaning and weight that they should. One is left wondering why this man could possibly have had so much influence in his life, in death, and in the decades since.

More effective in Gerald Armin’s production is a sequence in Act II as Harry spots Barbara wearing a pink triangle – a symbol sewn onto the shirts of gay men in Nazi concentration camps, but reclaimed as a symbol of gay pride, especially by the ACT UP anti-AIDS movement, in the 1980s. This triggers more flashbacks from Harry, to his time in a Second World War camp.

The sequence requires an abrupt change of character for Harry, and while Ball does his best to sell the anger he spits at Ryder’s Barbara, it’s never wholly convincing. In the original short story, the Nazi camp story is told to Harry by his friend Izzie; the compression of that part of the narrative to make it Harry’s story might seem to give the musical’s lead character a stronger arc, but it never sits quite true.

It all adds up to a tale where gay people and storylines seem secondary to that of an old, straight man finding his place in the world after the loss of his wife. Which is sweet – and, one imagines, would hit home a lot more for Jewish audience members – but feels antithetical to the spirit of what Harvey Milk stood for.

A Letter to Harvey Milk’s set is predominantly grey, with the barest flashes of the rainbow flag that is the most recognisable symbol of gay pride. As decoration for a play which is less about pride than its title suggests, it feels completely appropriate.

Scott Matthewman