White Rose at Marylebone Theatre – Big Voices, Shallow Roots

White Rose: Marylebone Theatre until 13th April

Nothing says rebellion like belting out a power ballad about not being silent! It’s almost as contradictory as Ethel Merman’s recording Whispering! But here we are, a new musical, an original score by Natalie Brice, and in a new theatre near Baker Street that I have wanted to visit for some time.

The theatre itself? Lovely. Modern. Comfortable. Great sightlines. This is the venue’s first musical, and they’ve chosen a powerful true story.

The real White Rose was a student-led resistance in Munich. From 1942 to 1943, they wrote and distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, calling for resistance against Hitler. Brother and sister Sophie and Hans Scholl, along with Christoph Probst, were caught and executed. Their courage was extraordinary, their defiance inspiring. They weren’t just rebellious students; they were martyrs for truth. That weight, that urgency, is sadly missing here.

The story is important. It should be told. But here’s where things falter. Mixing a modern score with historical events isn’t the issue. Hamilton proves it can work brilliantly. But these songs? They don’t drive the plot forward. They’re loud, high-energy, and full of what I call “scream-singing.” And the lyrics? When you hear someone rhyming leeches with speeches, you know you’re in trouble.

The book, penned by Brian Belding, is just as thin. The real story is complex, full of tension and danger. Here, it’s all surface-level. It is a perspective that we don’t get to see – Germans. There’s little sense of the risks they took. The Scholls were layered individuals, Hans, for example, had indecency charges against him that the show ignores. This adaptation strips away the nuance, reducing the characters to symbols and clichés rather than people.

As an example, there’s the moment where they name the movement. The actual origins are unclear, but in the show the conversation goes like this:

“What should we call it?”
“How about The White Rose?”
“Oh, that sounds good!”

And off we go. This is indicative of the issues with the book.

The cast do their best to bring these historical figures to life. Collette Guitart plays Sophie Scholl, the passionate and fearless leader of the movement. She has powerhouse vocals, but her approach to the shortcomings of the book is to throw away her lines, which throws things off balance. Tobias Turley, who was seen on the reality show Mamma Mia! I Have a Dream, is Hans Scholl, her equally determined brother who co-founded the resistance. He sings well but isn’t given the opportunity to develop a nuanced character, it is revealed that he was a member of the Hitler Youth, but this isn’t explored in a meaningful way.

The remainder of the small cast work hard, but they can’t overcome the superficiality of the dialogue, and some are clichés, the former boyfriend who is now in the SS, for example. The programme includes some extracts of the actual leaflets, it would be far more effective if they were incorporated into the show, again as Lin-Manuel Miranda does so brilliantly.

The direction and staging is superficial and unimaginative, when the cast sheepishly line up at the front of the stage towards the end of the show holding the leaflets, you think, oh, here it comes and sure enough, they throw them over the audience. Not once, but twice!

In the end, White Rose: The Musical feels well-intentioned but hollow. The songs are generic, the dialogue superficial, and the storytelling lacks the depth the subject deserves. This story should be told but in an imaginative, more theatrical way.

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