Despite compelling subject matter, White Rose the Musical is a big disappointment at Marylebone Theatre
“I know what evil sounds like”
It is perhaps no accident that the last time the story of The White Rose was staged in London, people were reeling from the impact of a Trump presidency and figuring what if any useful protests could be made. Ross McGregor’s much-missed Arrows and Traps company did a phenomenal job of telling the story of a resistance movement that worked from within Nazi Germany back in 2018; now in 2025, White Rose the Musical attempts the same with book & lyrics by Brian Belding and music by Natalie Brice.
As a deeply relevant and powerfully felt piece of storytelling, it ought to respond well to the musical treatment but too much is fatally confused here. Brice’s score has early flickers of something interesting as the gathered university students plot to challenge Hitler’s ferociously effective propaganda machine, indie-pop songs capturing a touch of their energy, but too often the composer defaults to bland pastiches of rousing revolutionary anthems that have been done much better in much more famous musicals. It means we get some impressive belting from the company but little sense of reasoned musical identity.
She’s not helped by banal lyrics that are almost offensively generic, given the stakes here – the effect is to seriously undersell the intensity of the situation. Siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl reunite after his conscription at a university in Munich in 1943, determined to resist any way possible. They alight on an anti-disinformation campaign, telling the truth about a WWII campaign that is finally not going the way the German regime wants, even as they tell the German public otherwise. Despite the immense danger to themselves and their colleagues, they create and distribute leaflets that shout out that truth.
Will Nunziata’s direction lacks the control to ensure this story shines through, again stymied by a book from Belding with insufficient intellectual curiosity. Collette Guitart delivers strident vocals but huge emotional reserve as Sophie which comes across as underplaying, particularly against the broader performances of Tobias Turley as brother Hans, Owen Arkrow’s fellow student Willi and Ollie Wray’s Frederick, Sophie’s former flame who now works for the Gestapo and is naturally torn between fascism and running away to Switzerland with her.
Such unevenness in the performances works against genuine emotion being built up and with no movement or choreography credited, there’s nothing to unify the staging either. The fact that the show’s attempted coup de théâtre is repeated more than once feels like a tacit acknowledgement that more inspiration is needed. A real disappointment given the profundity of the story and its enduring pertinence – someone give Arrows & Traps a call to mount a revival instead.
