Is London’s West End Jewish enough for David Baddiel’s musical The Infidel?

David Baddiel has turned his movie, The Infidel, into a musical. The set-up is so contrived and clumsy that it has a sweetness all its own. A golden-hearted London cabbie, named Mahmoud, discovers that he was adopted at birth and that his real parents were Jewish. This strikes him as intriguing rather than alarming, and he starts to investigate Judaism with the sort of disinterested curiosity of a man taking up astronomy after inheriting a telescope and a star-chart from an eccentric uncle. Mahmoud wants an easy life so he keeps his secret from his wife, Saamiyah, and from his son, Rasheed, who plans to marry a girl named Ji-Ji whose father is a ranting Islamic bigot.

This is significant plot-wise because it means that the chief source of conflict, a potential bust-up between his son and his son’s fiancée’s dad, is at several removes from the main character. The lovers, Rasheed and Ji-Ji, are as flavourless as marshmallows and it’s impossible to care whether their romance blooms or dies. To write a musical comedy with a tedious love affair at its heart is quite a serious blunder. Clearly Baddiel doesn’t wish to be burned in effigy or to become fatwa fodder but he treats his Muslim characters so cautiously that they become bland and almost unbelievable. He’s more at ease, and much funnier, with the Jewish side of his story but here he may have overestimated his audience. A lot of the bar mitzvah jokes, and the Yiddish tags, will mystify those without an intimate grasp of Jewish culture.

Kev Orkian bumbles and grins nicely enough as Mahmoud, although he looks far too Anglo-Saxon to be either Muslim or Jewish. There are excellent performances from Steven Serlin as the Rabbi and from geeky blonde Melanie Masson in a variety of cameos.