05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Musical about UnitedHealthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangioni premiering in S.F.
Having already dominated social media and thirsty group chats, Luigi Mangione is poised to take over another medium: musical theater.
But 'Luigi the Musical,' which opens June 13, at the Taylor Street Theatre (formerly the Exit on Taylor), isn't just about the 26-year-old prime suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Nova Bradford, Arielle Johnson, André Margatini and Caleb Zeringue's show was inspired by an extraordinary coincidence of celebrity inmates.
Zeringue, who produces and plays a guard in the show as well as co-writes, recalled how, one night at South of Market leather bar the SF Eagle, Bradford said to him, 'Did you hear that Luigi's in the same prison with Diddy and Sam Bankman-Fried? I wanna write a musical about that.'
In the show, set at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center, rapper and music producer Sean 'Diddy' Combs, who last year was charged with sex trafficking and racketeering, and the fallen FTX CEO are characters too, played by Janeé Lucas and Margatini, respectively.
'These three people represent these big pillars of institutions in society that are failing in their trust: health care, Hollywood and then big tech,' Zeringue told the Chronicle.
Bradford, Johnson and Zeringue all know each other from San Francisco's stand-up comedy scene. They felt that Mangione and his fellow inmates lent themselves to musical theater for several reasons.
'Luigi the character, as we've written him, is dead serious about his thoughts and goals,' Johnson said. 'There's something campy about the whole 'good guy with a gun' premise.'
One inspiration for the show was 'Chicago,' with its cellblock numbers, Johnson noted, so in the production, audiences will see Luigi (Jonny Stein) burst into song behind bars, lamenting, 'I shouldn't have bought those hash browns in that Pennsylvania Mickey D's.'
For his part, the character of Bankman-Fried gives a Ted Talk into a camera from his prison cell.
'He literally just podcasted with Tucker Carlson from the prison cell with Diddy,' Zeringue pointed out, referring to the Bay Area crypto currency entrepreneur's appearance on 'The Tucker Carlson Show' in March. 'So I'm like, did we write this musical or did it write itself?'
'One of the central ideas that we wanted to explore with this musical is this tendency for us to project meaning onto these types of figures,' she said.
She also noted the surprise value in a musical that's so immediate and zeitgeist-y it's 'of Twitter right now.'
Johnson's other writing credit in the genre, 'The Minotaur: A Dark Comedy About Losing Your Mind in Grad School,' took five years to pen. By contrast, Johnson and Bradford whipped up 'Luigi the Musical' in two months — far beating out any hypothetical miniseries that has the internet demanding that Palo Alto's own Dave Franco (of the 'Now You See Me' film franchise) to play Mangione.
But it was important to the trio that their show not glorify homicide or any of the allegations against their other subjects.
'We're not valorizing any of these characters, and we're also not trivializing any of their actions or alleged actions,' Bradford emphasized.
Still, she continued, 'Comedy inherently plays at the margins of social acceptability.' Zeringue pointed out that comedy is often called a 'benign violation.' If Mangione taps into what the betrayal that so many feel about health care and other institutions, comedy is perfectly poised to heal.
'When people interact with these systems that they've lost trust in, it creates such a sense of isolation, and comedy inherently is connective,' Bradford said.
