Showing @ C venues – C, Edinburgh until Mon 25 Aug (not 11) @ 20:55
It’s Chicago, 1924 and there is crime afoot but not the gangsters you might expect. Dark tales are nothing new for musicals (think of ‘Mack the Knife’ or the wife beater in Carousel). Here we have a musical – book, music and lyrics by Stephen Dolginoff – featuring the famous child killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb who inspired Hitchcock’s movie Rope. Both were rich law students whose reading of Nietzche and the nature of good and evil had convinced them that they were above the common moral code. Their unhealthy, co-dependent relationship culminates in devising the perfect crime: getting away with murder.
With minimal props and set the plot is effectively abetted by Richard Williamson’s lighting while Guy Retallack’s economical production moves the darkly comic psycho drama along. Danny Colligan is excellent from the beginning as impressionable Leopold – the chilling junior partner and Jo Parsons as the suave Loeb – the manipulative instigator, is a relentless slow burn of a performance. Both are great singers. Even the rinky-dink solo piano accompaniment works well. The story-with-a-twist is not so much about the crime but about the criminals’ warped mindset and how the perfect murder (and a relationship redolent of S&M) so quickly unravelled. None of the tunes is hugely memorable but together work well. If there is a cavil it’s that the songs’ ungainly lyrics and moon/June rhymes (more Tim Rice than Cole Porter) become a bit wearying after a while.