Theatre in Review: White Rose: The Musical (Theatre Row) The story of The White Rose is nearly always worth telling, although, as the current version shows, how you tell it makes all the difference. A group of university students in Nazi Germany, its members risked (and mostly lost) their lives by participating in activities that included disseminating pamphlets urging their fellow citizens to resist Hitler's regime. According to the National World War II Museum, this little band "distributed thousands, reaching households all over Germany. Acquiring such large amounts of paper, envelopes, and stamps at a time of strict rationing without raising suspicion was problematic, but the students managed by engaging a wide-ranging network of supporters in cities and towns as far north as Hamburg, and as far south as Vienna. These networks were also activated to distribute the pamphlets, attempting to trick the Gestapo into believing the White Rose had locations all across the country." The members of The White Rose were part of a loose network of mostly young intellectuals and artists who undermined the German war effort by any means possible, firm in the knowledge that their technically treasonous activities were committed in the name of the greater good. (According to Norman Ohler's fascinating book The Bohemians, such groups tended to be nimble and non-hierarchical, the better to strike when opportunities presented themselves.) The subject has been memorialized in two well-received German films, The White Rose (1982) and Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005). A 1991 Off-Broadway play, The White Rose, starred future Oscar winner Melissa Leo as Sophie, one of the group's most prominent members. Then there's White Rose: The Musical, which boils down a wrenching and complicated historical episode into a strenuously earnest, cliché-ridden manifesto. Seemingly conceived and executed with the best of intentions, it turns real-life figures into one-dimensional musical theatre ingenues who are forever looking to the stars, seeking truth in their hearts, and finding their voices. Based on figures who were intellectuals, schooled in German culture and philosophy, and often deeply religious -- Sophie Scholl was a fan of Augustine of Hippo -- the musical's characters, a remarkably naïve lot, spend an extraordinary amount of time singing about themselves. Brian Belding's libretto focuses on most of The White Rose's core members: Sophie Scholl; her brother, Hans; Christoph Probst; Willi Graf; and their professor Kurt Huber. Sophie, who, in part because of her youth, joined them later on, is here made the founder and driving force, hectoring her overprotective sibling and his friends to stand up and fight. Hovering on the sidelines is Frederick Fischer, Sophie's ex-boyfriend, now a policeman who alternately threatens them and tries to save them from arrest. The book is so skeletal that many situations don't make sense: Frederick and Hans were once best friends but fell out over Sophie, for reasons that are barely explored. Frederick also has a major beef with Huber, who got the young man expelled for his anti-Nazi writings. Huber, himself a dissident, explains that he acted to save Frederick, but his logic is murky and it's not clear how Frederick went from being a protestor to a supporter of the government. Sophie befriends Lila, a Jew, who, in disguise ("Ha! If Mama could see me as a blonde") runs a stationery store that does custom printing. Yet when Sophie, without explanation, asks for the store's mimeograph machine, Lila hands it over without explanation. The characters express themselves in songs that range from unevocative pop-rock to power ballads. The lyrics are at best basic, with rhymes you can see coming from a mile away. Arriving in Munich, Sophie announces, "Poets and artists all found their way here/Some people still cling/Onto hope and not fear." Willi reports, "I ignored the decree to join/The Hitler Youth rank/My goals were higher than/Asinine marching or tanks/Thrown in jail/What could we do?/Soon I knew what was true." The frustrated Hans exclaims, "We tried and failed to open their eyes/To help them see through all of the lies/How naïve to think someone would care/Be inspired by us and then maybe they'd dare." One would-be exuberant number, featuring everyone in a tavern, leaping around with tankards of beer, is an embarrassing misfire. The cast includes many notable young talents: Jo Ellen Pellman (Sophie), Mike Cefalo (Hans), Kennedy Kanagawa (Christoph), Cole Thompson (Willi), and Sam Gravitte (Frederick), plus the veteran Paolo Montalban as Huber; everyone sings well but they're stymied by the script. When Sophie and the others first discuss distributing leaflets, Hans, shocked, asks, "Are you all serious about this?" Willi cracks, "Could be fun! Sounds better than doing homework." (That must be one tough class assignment.) Arrested and facing execution, Hans tells Sophie, "You know, there are some people who don't talk to their sister when they grow up and here we are, dying together. Kind of sweet, huh?" Whatever you say, kid. The production is sensibly designed, with James Noone's two-level set, featuring moving panels, allowing for fast transitions. Alan C. Edwards' lighting is solid throughout, although he and Noone might have done something about the strip light atop the upstage wall, which sometimes creates eye-glaring effects. Sophia Choi's costumes are okay, Caite Hevner's projections keep us up to speed with the date and location of each scene, and Elisabeth Weidner's sound design has a thoroughly natural quality. The show doesn't make enough of the bleak irony that the group was destroyed just as the war was turning definitively against Germany; it's fascinating to speculate what would have happened if Hans, Sophie, and the others had lived to see Hitler's fall. In any event, this urgent, compelling subject requires more skill than this show's creators can supply; the young-adult-fiction treatment applied here robs the narrative of its power. The story of The White Rose is deeply important, especially so today, but this version is simply a mistake. --David Barbour 
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