White Rose, 02 February 2024
White Rose contained a lot of beautiful puzzle pieces that didn’t coalesce into a cohesive audience experience. Though telling a Holocaust story through the eyes of Gentiles who resisted Hitler was a truly wonderful and inspirational concept, the collective Gestalt of the musical left the half empty house underwhelmed.
Part of why the show is struggling is structural in nature. Transitions between and within songs were abrupt if existent, and the blocking did not support the rapidity of these shifts. Some of the language in the songs contained multi syllabic metaphors, while other concepts were so vaguely defined that they bordered on indiscernible. There was one song early on containing the mission of the White Rose and some of the rhetoric they were distributing, but then a large chunk of the middle was a series of similar scenes in which the characters wanting to do something, not defining exactly what they wanted to say or what they were responding to, and agreeing to meet back up later. It seemed like the characters felt they were doing important work, and while I understand that the secrecy was part of the point, I did not feel connected to the specifics enough to feel emotionally connected to the characters. We knew that they were against Hitler, but that was about it. At the very end, there was another moment where we did hear the rhetoric, but it was too little too late.
The score and the orchestrations struggled with a unique problem– the lack of female voices in a show with one real female actress, and another who played a featured role but was not part of ensemble numbers to round out chords. This was handled by taking the violin part up an octave. For the most part, this concept worked well. The textural use of harmonics created a definitive atmosphere that was chilling at first, but became hackneyed from overuse. Overall, the substance of the musical moments was great, but the transitions and modulations did not flow naturally.
It felt like Brian Belding’s book and libretto were written by different people. The libretto was very specific and crammed with metaphors– too many ideas were hitting the audience too fast, and the tempos of a lot of the musical numbers did not lend themselves to easily discernible diction. The audience lost a lot of the ideas from straining to hear and discern the words. The book was incredibly vague. While conceptually this could have been commentary on subversive activity, in theatre it missed the mark. I wanted to understand the characters’ relationships to each other, particularly Willi and Christoph, who did not feel connected to the rest of the group. At the end of the show, I really only felt like I knew Sophie and Hans. I found Sam Gravitte’s voice to be beautiful, but did not think his character, Frederick, was well integrated into the dramatic structure of the show.
The end of the show missed an opportunity to leave the audience with chills and the true impact of Gentiles being executed for writing pamphlets against the Nazi regime. If we had heard the loud sound of the guillotine with the blackout, the audience would have felt that conclusion to their core.
I have to give a shoutout to Alan C. Edwards for his beautiful lighting design, scenic designer James Noone, and the scenic painters, all of whom did a fantastic job making White Rose come alive visually. While it was clear that all of the cast members had their talents, no one was exceptional or spellbinding at both acting and singing, which left a lot to be desired in terms of character development– we did not see much growth and change. The characters were resolute from the start and did not take us on a journey with character arcs.
All of that said– I see clear potential in this story, and in each individual collaborator, both on stage and beyond. White Rose contains moving ideas and beautiful moments, but its current form needs some structural revision to put more emotional power and connection into the show. The leaflets dropped near the end contained powerful words and I would have loved to hear more about these ideas and learn about the actual people they arose from, rather than the vagueness of being part of a subversive act and worrying about being caught, without the audience having clarity about what treasonous things were being said and why everybody’s neck was on the line. I applaud this effort and I hope that, with time and necessary revisions, this message can live on and reach a wider audience.
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