Not since Elizabeth Taylor stole Eddie Fisher from her best mate Debbie Reynolds and then ran off with her Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton has there been such an onset furore involving a Jewish actor.
And it all comes down to Hampstead.
For the north Londoners among us, Hampstead is the place of beautiful greenery, fantastic pubs, so-pretty-they-are-almost-twee alleys and, when I was growing up, the place to hang out on a Thursday night (the subject of my first-ever JC piece when I was 15).
But now it is also the name of a controversial new song by Ariana Grande about her romance with married Jewish co-star Ethan Slater while they were filming the movie Wicked in the UK.
The production of the much-lauded musical, based on the stage show by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, took nearly two years and meant all the key cast had to move to the UK. Megastar Grande, who found fame as a child and was nominated for an Oscar for her role as the good witch Glinda, lived in Hampstead. At the time she described how she “loved meandering around and visiting different shops and places and pubs… It’s so delightful and fun”.
When she arrived in December 2022, she was still married to her husband of two years, estate agent Dalton Gomez, but a month later they announced their separation. Within a few months it was rumoured that she was getting close to Ethan – then a little-known Broadway star who appears as the nebbish Boq – in the pubs of Hampstead.
In July 2023 he announced his split from wife and childhood sweetheart Lilly Jay, the mother of his baby son. It is fair to say there was a scandal – so much so that Grande and Slater were apparently advised to lay low and not publicise their romance.
But by the time the film came out at the end of last year, there were many PDAs (that’s public displays of affection in showbiz talk) on the red carpet.
Lilly Jay, Slater’s clinical psychologist and now ex-wife, wrote an emotional piece in magazine The Cut about the pain of not only going through a divorce with a young child, but also the agony of seeing your ex and his new love all over the papers and becoming a public figure when you are an intensely private person.
“I confidently moved to another country with my two-month-old baby and my husband to support his career,” she wrote. “Consumed by the magic and mundanity of new motherhood, I didn’t understand the growing distance between us.
“Motherhood, I have learnt, fills your time but not your mind. In the countless hours I spend rocking my son to sleep, pushing his stroller, marvelling at his sweaty little hands grasping a crayon, I work diligently on my private project of accepting the sudden public downfall of my marriage.
“This, I tell myself, is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide.”
Now, all this pain has been opened up again with the release of Hampstead, a bonus track on Grande’s new album Eternal Sunshine Deluxe: Brighter Days Ahead.
Much of the album is apparently about the break-up of her own marriage but the song is also a riposte to those who criticised her romance with Slater.
Understandably, she has her own things to say about what has happened.
Among the lyrics are: “I left my heart at a pub in Hampstead/ And I misplaced my mind in a good way/ Threw away my reputation but saved us more heartache/ Yes, I know it seems f***ed up and you’re right”.
The second and final Wicked film is due to be released later this year. Let’s hope by then that the furore will have died down for all of their sakes.
Meanwhile, in happier news, Jewish actress Emma Kingston has taken over the key role of wicked witch Elphaba in the hit London production of Wicked – her big opening night will be early next month.
