“You’ve got a lot of fans out there, people are posting, marching in the streets,” the prison security guard tells a young inmate with thick eyebrows, handing him a stack of fan mail. “Apparently, there’s even a musical.”
“What kind of sick fucks would buy tickets to something like that?” the prisoner asks, prompting a round of laughter from the audience.
It’s Monday night and Luigi: The Musical has made its New York City debut as a staged reading to a sold-out crowd at the Green Room 42, a cabaret club in Hell’s Kitchen.
Four actors sit on chairs on stage, three are dressed in orange jumpsuits and one wears a prison guard uniform. The three incarcerated characters are meant to represent United Healthcare CEO shooting suspect Luigi Mangione as well as convicted felons Sean “Diddy” Combs and cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried. The musical focuses on an imagined friendship between the three men, who at one point were all being held at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Satirizing American Institutions
“These are three men who represent the three pillars of American life that people have lost trust in over the past 15 years,” the musical’s creator Nova Bradford tells me. She’s referring to healthcare, Hollywood, and Big Tech. “Symbolically, we’re telling a story about America’s relationship to these institutions through the story of these three individuals in prison.”
The plot is loosely about the three famous inmates planning a prison escape, but it’s really a critique about society’s relationship with celebrity worship, with commentary about the for-profit healthcare industry woven in. The script hides serious moral and ethical conversations about fame, political violence, and powerful institutions amongst jokes about hashbrowns. It talks about why we, as a culture, venerate certain people, as well as looking at the cultural response to different high-profile criminals and suspects.
The Complexity of Public Perception
Bradford said she had been thinking of doing a musical about Diddy and Bankman-Fried incarcerated together, and was further inspired once she saw the polarizing public respond to Mangione’s arrest. “The way the public’s response seemed to be divided didn’t seem to fall across existing political polarization,” Bradford says. “It didn’t seem to be aligning with other fault lines that I am accustomed to looking for. As a satirist, that was an interesting subject that caused me to think, ‘What’s going on here?’”
She says a common misconception from people is that the show is celebrating Mangione. “This show is very explicitly neither pro nor anti [Mangione],” Bradford says. “Or it’s perhaps more accurate to say that it’s both pro and anti. We’re engaging with all of the types of responses that the audience might be having, so the goal is that, regardless of someone’s existing opinions on the subject matter, they will see the show and find that their perspective is both reflected and also challenged.”
Bradford hopes that the musical will remind the audience about the relationship between art and politics. “I hope that this can be part of a broader push to demonstrate that art, including musical theater, is still political, still current, and can still be challenging in the way that it entertains and pushes its audience,” she says.