Review: Anti-Fascism Requires a Chorus of Voices in "Cable Street"

Cable Street

Music and lyrics by Tim Gilvin

Book by Alex Kanefsky

Directed by Adam Lenson

Presented by 10 to 4 Productions at 59E59 Theaters

59 E 59 St., Manhattan, NYC

April 26-May 24, 2026

The company of Cable Street. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

Deep into new musical Cable Street, a trio of mothers sing about how the violence, connected to fascism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and war, that has scarred their lives in the past is, as the song's title says, "Happening Again." These characters are singing to us from 1936 London, but the parallels of their fear and anxiety with those of the current moment are affecting and inescapable. Cable Street, from Tim Gilvin and Alex Kanefsky, zooms in on the eponymous East London street during the lead-up to, occurrence, and aftermath of what has come to be called the Battle of Cable Street, when a coalition of anti-fascist protestors including Jews, Irish, and Communists clashed with the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and the police sent to safeguard the BUF's planned march through the primarily Jewish district of the East End. Part of 59E59's annual Brits Off Broadway festival, which showcases "UK writers and producers … representing the breadth of British independent theater" and runs this year from April 14th through June 28th, Cable Street puts a trio of disempowered families at the heart of a stirring, gripping, and multifaceted exploration of why people are drawn to fascism and the potential–and costs–to be found in solidarity and resistance to such forces.

Max Alexander-Taylor, Romona Lewis-Malley, Isaac Gryn, Annie Majin, and Barney Wilkinson in Cable Street. Photo by Carl Rosegg.

Cable Street puts a contemporary frame around its historical narrative, as an American woman named Oonagh (Debbie Chazen) arrives for an East End walking tour led by Steve (Jez Unwin). (The play juxtaposes Steve's tour with the greater public interest in lurid murders and negative stereotypes about the East End.) Steve incorporates into his tour–the customers for which are as diverse as the area itself was and is–entries from a journal kept by his uncle Sammy Sheinberg, an erstwhile resident of Cable Street. This journal serves as a gateway to Cable Street in 1936, when Sammy (a captivating Isaac Gryn) is an aspiring boxer living with his family–father Yitzhak (Jez Unwin), a tailor; mother Rachel (Natalie Elisha-Welsh); brother Moishe (Ethan Pascal Peters); and sister Rosa (Romona Lewis-Malley)–and struggling to find employment, due not only to economic conditions but also to anti-Semitism. Ron Williams (Barney Wilkinson, fantastic in the role) is both Sammy's neighbor and his blonde, Christian mirror image: he lives with his mother, Edie (Preeya Kalidas), whose penchant for gin can be linked to her husband's death in the Great War, and he is similarly unable to secure a job, leaving him susceptible to the BUF's promises of "British jobs for British people." (It seems significant that Ron is from Lancashire, which experienced mass unemployment due to the demise of the region's once-booming textile industry.) Mairead Kenny (Lizzy-Rose Esin Kelly), as magnetic a figure for the audience as Mairead becomes for her community, lives on the Irish third of Cable Street with her mother, Kathleen (Debbie Chazen); her brother, Sean (Max Alexander-Taylor, who also plays acoustic and electric guitar in the show); and sister-in-law Orlaith (Aoife Mac Namara). Despite the "No Irish Need Apply" signs that dot the city, Mairead, who composes poetry and wants to become a writer, does have employment, working in a Jewish bakery when she is not helping out with domestic chores and Sean and Orlaith's infant at home.

Ethan Pascal Peters, Aoife Mac Namara, Natalie Elisha-Welsh, and Romona Lewis-Malley in Cable Street. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

Employed or not, everyone's rents are going up, and the usual blame of immigrants and Others (including, as Mairead reminds her immigrant mother, by immigrants and the marginalized themselves) is increasing in intensity and fascist movements are gaining followers in Britain and on the continent, with Hitler leading the Nazi Party in Germany and Spain teetering on the edge of civil war. Mairead starts to see something in what local Communist Party members Sol (Ethan Pascal Peters) and Elizabeth (Aoife Mac Namara) are saying: in the early song "What Next?" she admonishes the patrons of an Irish pub about their fixation on the past when Sean starts playing "The Rocky Road to Dublin," asking "we're all English now, so what're we gonna sing?" Socialism, in contrast, offers a vision of a path to a better future. Sammy, while angry about his treatment as a worker and a Jew, is resistant to joining any movement, but with BUF leader Oswald Mosley planning a march that the government refuses to cancel and Jewish and Communist leaders urging the avoidance of direct conflict with the fascists, everyone will be forced to choose where they stand and whether they stand up.

The company of Cable Street. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

Interspersed within this narrative are periodic returns to the present day and Oonagh's and Steve's connections to Cable Street, as well as uptempo expository songs in the 1936 timeline delivered by a quartet of newspaper hawkers, each with the voice of his or her paper's target demographic. Of the four, only the Daily Mail, represented by Peters in a suitably and humorously unflattering way, is pro-fascist. The story of Ron's attraction to fascism is little different from those of many of the exploited, especially young men, today, a reminder of how the periodic crises inherent in capitalism repeatedly push people towards populism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism (Ron sees Mosley as someone who will "shake it all up," a sentiment that should sound very familiar). The circulation of Mairead's poetry, meanwhile, aided by Sammy, suggests the power of art to catalyze change and community (and depending on how close your seats are to the stage, you might even leave with a copy of one of Mairead's poems). At the same time, the play dramatizes more than the obvious physical risks of fighting for change, as none of the main characters is exactly feted by family members upon returning home after the Battle of Cable Street.  

The company of Cable Street. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

Much of the show's excellent score is rock-influenced, incorporating elements like guitar solos, synths, or distorted bass at various points, and the cast is stacked with vocal talent, on display in Yitzhak's ballad of worry for his son, sung by Unwin; Kalidas's rousing part as American journalist Elizabeth Warner in the anti-fascist "¡No Pasarán!"; and Kelly's galvanizing call for community resistance in "The Wolf is at the Door," to name a few memorable examples. As Sammy, Gryn's vocals often have a hip-hop cadence to them, a percussiveness fitting for a quick-to-anger pugilist and which contrasts with Ron's more traditional style, perhaps more impressively seen in Wilkinson's soaring performance in "Shut Me Out." The actors take on multiple roles (Unwin, for example, plays local BUF leader Mick as well as Steve and Yitzhak), increasing the story's sense of scale (as does a spectacular image of a mounted police officer during the impressively staged Battle scene). The backdrop for this narrative sweep is Yoav Segal's set, which centers a brick wall with tattered posters, flanked by corrugated sheet metal and chain link fencing, and places the band–keyboardist Garret Healey, bassist Tina Lama, and drummer Martine G. Mauro-Wade–above stage and behind some of said fencing, like an industrial version of a Renaissance theater. The play's final scene–which also reminds us that the larger enemy is capitalism–reprises the show's anthemic opener "My Street" with a significant change in one possessive pronoun and draws attention to how certain lessons of history, like how the ruling classes rely on creating self-perpetuating divisions in order to maintain their power, clearly have not yet been absorbed. As, in the year that marks the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, it indeed all seems to be "happening again," Cable Street prompts us to remember what class consciousness and coming together can accomplish.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards