‘Luigi the Musical' is the most talked-about play in S.F. It's also terrible
Furor has erupted over the world premiere of 'Luigi the Musical' at the tiny Taylor Street Theatre in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood.
The show quickly made national headlines, with a story in the New York Post, a mention on 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' and a TV news crew from KPIX setting up a camera outside the theater for opening night on Friday, June 13. With the kind of publicity few new plays at 49-seat theaters would dare dream of, it instantly sold out its initial run and — just hours before hitting the stage — announced an additional July date at the Independent.
But the very existence of a musical about Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the frenzy it's sparked, are telling all the same. 'Luigi the Musical' has lessons for the state of theater, and it suggests other, better storytelling possibilities around the collective rage at our for-profit healthcare system for which Mangione has become a symbol.
Musical theater has frequently dramatized killers — see 'Assassins,' 'Sweeney Todd' and 'Chicago.' But an open murder case with no conviction is less common subject matter. For one, it usually takes more than a few months to write a decent musical. Legal risks are higher, too, not to mention the queasiness around whether it's simply too soon to make art about someone's death. How do you explore, honestly and with depth, what's made an accused killer a folk hero to some while neither glorifying nor trivializing his alleged crime?
'Luigi the Musical,' which was written by Nova Bradford, Arielle Johnson, André Margatini and Caleb Zeringue, doesn't have such high aims. It mostly wants to make easy jokes about Luigi (Jonny Stein), Diddy (Janeé Lucas) and SBF (André Margatini), drawing on how the real-life Mangione was held in the same detention center as crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and rapper and producer Sean 'Diddy' Combs, who's currently being tried on sex trafficking and racketeering charges.
Yes, potential punch lines abound in Luigi's McDonald's hash browns, in SBF's robotic nerdiness, in Diddy's fondness for underage girls. But 'Luigi the Musical' delivers them with all the finesse of a sketch comedy's first draft. 'Bringing down a tiny part of our broken healthcare system brings me enough happiness to share,' goes one lyric, the two uses of 'bring' in one line lacerating the ear.
Johnson's songs plod, with verse upon verse repeating the same lyrics sans any musical development, like ditties chained to tonic chords that you might hear during amateur hour at a community center. Elsewhere, random snippets of song hijack the proceedings to no end. Singers honk and croak.
The staging dithers. Your inner high school theater teacher yearns to beg one performer to take her hands out of her pockets. Another actor so swallows his lines it's as if he doesn't want you to actually look at him, even though he's in a theater under stage lights. At one point on opening night, a stagehand forgot to silence a walkie-talkie.
The show hasn't made basic decisions about when its revelations happen. Are we and Luigi supposed to know who SBF is when he first enters their shared Metropolitan Detention Center cell, or is that bomb supposed to drop a few lines later? Why does Luigi start journaling his thoughts the instant a stranger suggests it to him? And if it's supposed to be meaningful, why does he seem to abandon the project seconds later?
Yet 'Luigi the Musical' finds its heart when Luigi and a guard (Zeringue) commiserate over health insurance woes. 'Something in me broke when they said, 'You have been denied,'' goes one line. Then: 'I wanted them to understand what it feels like when someone else gets to decide if you live or die.'
The musical's opening on the eve of the No Kings demonstrations feels like more than coincidence. It's part of a broader hunger to see omnipotent-seeming leaders, and the systems that entrench them, get toppled. Even though it often takes years and lots of money to write a successful musical, art can have a role in that effort. In their heyday, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and El Teatro Campesino helped audiences cut bosses and politicians down to human, defeatable size.
In our own time, the massive interest in 'Luigi the Musical' — and its sold-out opening night of younger-than-usual theatergoers — proves that we still crave theater that helps us make sense of current events and envision fresh political possibilities. We don't just want faraway 'Saturday Night Live' sketches. We seek to see how a story will portray a figure of national importance, and we want to be there in the room for it.
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