Luigi The Musical: A Chaotic, Irreverent, Camp Spectacle

A small San Francisco production of a musical about Luigi Mangione (the alleged UnitedHealth CEO murderer) is taking the city by storm. I had an opportunity to watch it with a new friend last night, so here’s my review.

Initially, I felt conflicted about the premise: the growing worship of Luigi Mangione strikes me as a bit morally bankrupt. We need to be clear that he is accused of killing a man, in cold blood, with whom he had no personal relationship before. This was a targeted assassination act. I understand empathizing with him, similar to how many empathize with the man who assassinated a certain controversial Japanese prime minister who was affiliated with the cult that the man’s mother gave her life savings to. That’s a very human story. Just as I empathize(perhaps even more so than Mangione) with Gary Plauché, the father who killed his son’s kidnapper on live television in the 1980s.

Luigi Mangione, as Jesus, projected onto a building in Manhattan, NYC.

The fanfare that Mangione has received since the UnitedHealth incident is mass hybristophilia. He is a young, sexy Italian man. If that were different, Mangione would probably receive some passive empathy, but not to the level of fanfare he’s gotten. He also (allegedly) murdered a man, which makes him 1000x hotter to the monkey-brains of many Americans. However you feel about the state of American healthcare, we have a legal and social agreement that we don’t murder people!

The actual review

I’ll stop being a nerd about murder. I loved that this show had the audacity to make a gay, campy, horny musical about a cold-blooded murderer. I’m pretty much as close as you can get to being a free speech absolutist, and I think that art should be chaotic and irreverent. So the musical gets an A+ on that.

I won’t spoil too much, but parts reminded me of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. Not necessarily in plot, but in how campiness, shock value, and ultraviolence convey white-male angst directed not at an “other” but at an unnamed system. I think whether you agree with that premise is beside the point; it should be clear by now that young white men, across the board, are angry.

Other characters include P. Diddy and Sam Bankman-Fried. Allow me to be the friend who’s too woke: some moments felt like minstrelsy in a liberal way. In the way that Saturday Night Live feels sometimes (lulz).

I expected it to be progressive in a woke-scolding way, but was pleasantly surprised to find it a bit more intelligent than that. This makes me wonder if the Millennial order of the endless finger-wagging of the 2010s is finally fading as Gen Z comes of age and creates. As a lifelong fan of South Park and having enjoyed The Book of Mormon by its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, this musical felt closer to that than to Hamilton*. Thank God.

*I still like Hamilton and saw it on Broadway! I just think society has Hamilton fatigue(lulz)

Anywho, the entire musical was ridiculous and a small production. It wasn’t polished, and I loved it for that. It was also incredibly gay: a woman plays P. Diddy and a non-binary actress plays SBF. The plot contains various homosexual love stories and was very Wattpad-coded. Apparently, the writer/actors came up with the idea at The Eagle, a leather daddy Gay Bar in SF that occasionally hosts fun comedy nights. They even used to have a giant Leather Daddy pride flag that you could see as you got off the freeway in San Francisco.

Overall, the silliness exceeded my expectations. Amazing. We need more silliness in the world. I imagine this is what it was like in ancient Greece or old London, where writers staged the biggest scandals of the day. I’d gladly watch this over reality TV.

As we shift toward a more creative economy, I predict an increase in meme musicals and hyper-local productions tailored to niche subcultures. The entire Mangione saga was very theatrical, and I appreciated the production’s meta-awareness of that.

They’ve been sold out for the past few weeks and have added one more show, on August 11th. Buy a ticket: Luigi The Musical