Famed hot guy and (alleged) UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter, Luigi Mangione, is in federal prison. He’s currently being housed in the very same prison that Sean “Diddy” Combs also calls home. A group in San Francisco turned that odd team-up into a musical that focuses mainly on Mangione to tell a larger story about the many problems with modern America.
It’s campy, it’s silly, and it’s such a wild success in San Francisco that it might get a national tour.
Set in Brooklyn’s infamous Metropolitan Detention Center, the musical is knowingly absurd. It’s not tongue-in-cheek. It knows it’s kind of dumb and leaned into it, according to Summer Maxwell of SFGate.
Maxwell gave Luigi: The Musical a raving review, particularly highlighting its self-aware outrageousness as a feature, not a bug. The songs might not be great, but the rest of it is a blast.
There’s a Luigi Mangione Musical—and People Love It
What began as a fringe production at a tiny 49-seat theater is now drawing sold-out crowds at The Independent, a 350-seater. A fifth performance has been added by popular demand, and the creative team is hustling to bring the show to both the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and major cities like LA and NYC.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the show’s director, Nova Bradford, says the musical’s success lies in its ability to tap into our collective frustrations with the country today.
“There is this interesting thing that these three men represent three pillars of society that people have lost a lot of trust in in recent years, including health care, Hollywood, and the whole tech/VC/finance ecosystem.”
The show isn’t so much a study of Luigi as it is an examination of our collective cynicism. But it’s also, apparently, goofy and delightfully dumb. It doesn’t offer any profound answers to today’s most vexing societal questions, nor does it provide its characters with redemption arcs.
It wants us all to take a second to laugh at the horror of all of our institutions crumbling around us, and no one seemingly being able to stop them, not even a guy (allegedly) murdering the people directly involved in the destruction.
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