 It’s hard to ignore the pressure of turnaround when a show like Luigi the Musical lands at the Fringe. The assassination of a health insurance CEO is still fresh in public memory, and the temptation to rush something to the stage by capitalising on notoriety rather than craft certainly brings to mind last year’s ill-fated Willy Wonka Experience based show which collapsed under the weight of its own opportunism. This could easily have gone the same way.
But Luigi the Musical largely dodges that fate. While not flawless, it works because it knows exactly what it is: an absurd satire that leans gleefully into the “so crazy it must be true” territory. The set-up is wild enough - a Brooklyn prison cell where Luigi Mangione (Matthew Solomon), alleged assassin, shares close quarters with Sam Bankman-Fried and Sean “Diddy” Combs—and the writing wisely doesn’t try to sand down the chaos. Instead, it embraces the mess, letting farce and fantasy take over as fan mail, escape schemes, and the lure of celebrity start to blur the edges of reality. What holds it together, though, are the performances. Solomon’s Luigi is the dream boat, sympathetic presence, deftly shifting between the absurd and the oddly sincere, while the ensemble wrings genuine comic energy out of the sheer improbability of the set-up. The musical numbers, too, are memorable with catchy hooks. Some of the satire doesn’t land as sharply as it might, and there are moments when the show strains under the weight of being a one act play running nearly 70 minutes. But there’s a thrill in seeing theatre move so quickly to tackle the headlines, and Luigi the Musical earns its place not as a rushed cash-in, but as a bizarre, and surprisingly funny meditation on what happens when broken systems turn broken people into icons. Lee Hutchison Luigi The Musical Venue: Just the Club Room at Just The Tonic Legends Dates: August 20-23rd Time: 1955 Tickets: www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/luigi-the-musical |
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