Theatre review: The Pianist

Musician and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman's The Pianist, the Second World War memoir that was a big literary hit in the 1940s and is most recently known for the Oscar-winning film version, doesn't seem an immediately obvious candidate for a musical adaptation. And while that's largely how it's been marketed, I'd say a musical isn't really what adaptor-director Thom Southerland has delivered either. Wladyslaw (Dan Krikler) is one of four children in a fairly well-off Jewish family in Warsaw, whose comparative privilege allowed them to initially shield themselves from the effects of the Nazis' rise to power: His parents (Rosalind Ford and TJ Holmes) and sisters (Elzbieta Kalicka and Melania Maggiore) as well as, to an extent, Wladyslaw himself, all convince themselves that they've seen the worst of what the Germans are planning to do.Always a musical family, they largely retreat into music again, but as the Jewish part of town gets walled up into a ghetto and food supplies cut off, his…