Latest news with #TaylorStreetTheatre
San Francisco Chronicle
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
The Fringe Festival is a bat signal to S.F. theater weirdos
For relief from all the doom and gloom in Bay Area arts news, for a counterexample to the slick homogeneity of for-profit art, behold: The San Francisco Fringe Festival is still here, a bat signal alerting all the city's theatrical weirdos that it's time to come out and play. This year's iteration, Exit Theatre's 34th such event, takes place exclusively at the Taylor Street Theatre, now that the company has shuttered its Eddy Street venue. But there are still plenty of goodies to be had, starting with a return of San Francisco native Genie Cartier, whose 'The Curve' two years ago brought offbeat charm to her story of daring to be an acrobat despite her spine's unpromising shape. This time, in 'Box [M],' she directs Landyn Endo and Os Roxas in the story of a trans son and his father. Other highlights include three clown shows, including one whose character's name is Gherkin Picklewater, and the relatably titled 'I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Going to Take It Just a Little Bit Longer.'
San Francisco Chronicle
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Luigi the Musical' is the most talked-about play in S.F. It's also terrible
Furor has erupted over the world premiere of 'Luigi the Musical' at the tiny Taylor Street Theatre in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. The show quickly made national headlines, with a story in the New York Post, a mention on 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' and a TV news crew from KPIX setting up a camera outside the theater for opening night on Friday, June 13. With the kind of publicity few new plays at 49-seat theaters would dare dream of, it instantly sold out its initial run and — just hours before hitting the stage — announced an additional July date at the Independent. But the very existence of a musical about Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the frenzy it's sparked, are telling all the same. 'Luigi the Musical' has lessons for the state of theater, and it suggests other, better storytelling possibilities around the collective rage at our for-profit healthcare system for which Mangione has become a symbol. Musical theater has frequently dramatized killers — see 'Assassins,' 'Sweeney Todd' and 'Chicago.' But an open murder case with no conviction is less common subject matter. For one, it usually takes more than a few months to write a decent musical. Legal risks are higher, too, not to mention the queasiness around whether it's simply too soon to make art about someone's death. How do you explore, honestly and with depth, what's made an accused killer a folk hero to some while neither glorifying nor trivializing his alleged crime? 'Luigi the Musical,' which was written by Nova Bradford, Arielle Johnson, André Margatini and Caleb Zeringue, doesn't have such high aims. It mostly wants to make easy jokes about Luigi (Jonny Stein), Diddy (Janeé Lucas) and SBF (André Margatini), drawing on how the real-life Mangione was held in the same detention center as crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and rapper and producer Sean 'Diddy' Combs, who's currently being tried on sex trafficking and racketeering charges. Yes, potential punch lines abound in Luigi's McDonald's hash browns, in SBF's robotic nerdiness, in Diddy's fondness for underage girls. But 'Luigi the Musical' delivers them with all the finesse of a sketch comedy's first draft. 'Bringing down a tiny part of our broken healthcare system brings me enough happiness to share,' goes one lyric, the two uses of 'bring' in one line lacerating the ear. Johnson's songs plod, with verse upon verse repeating the same lyrics sans any musical development, like ditties chained to tonic chords that you might hear during amateur hour at a community center. Elsewhere, random snippets of song hijack the proceedings to no end. Singers honk and croak. The staging dithers. Your inner high school theater teacher yearns to beg one performer to take her hands out of her pockets. Another actor so swallows his lines it's as if he doesn't want you to actually look at him, even though he's in a theater under stage lights. At one point on opening night, a stagehand forgot to silence a walkie-talkie. The show hasn't made basic decisions about when its revelations happen. Are we and Luigi supposed to know who SBF is when he first enters their shared Metropolitan Detention Center cell, or is that bomb supposed to drop a few lines later? Why does Luigi start journaling his thoughts the instant a stranger suggests it to him? And if it's supposed to be meaningful, why does he seem to abandon the project seconds later? Yet 'Luigi the Musical' finds its heart when Luigi and a guard (Zeringue) commiserate over health insurance woes. 'Something in me broke when they said, 'You have been denied,'' goes one line. Then: 'I wanted them to understand what it feels like when someone else gets to decide if you live or die.' The musical's opening on the eve of the No Kings demonstrations feels like more than coincidence. It's part of a broader hunger to see omnipotent-seeming leaders, and the systems that entrench them, get toppled. Even though it often takes years and lots of money to write a successful musical, art can have a role in that effort. In their heyday, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and El Teatro Campesino helped audiences cut bosses and politicians down to human, defeatable size. In our own time, the massive interest in 'Luigi the Musical' — and its sold-out opening night of younger-than-usual theatergoers — proves that we still crave theater that helps us make sense of current events and envision fresh political possibilities. We don't just want faraway 'Saturday Night Live' sketches. We seek to see how a story will portray a figure of national importance, and we want to be there in the room for it.
San Francisco Chronicle
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.
San Francisco Chronicle
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Luigi the Musical' sells out in San Francisco
A new musical about Luigi Mangione has sold out more than a month before its premiere in San Francisco. Inspired by the social media frenzy surrounding Mangione, the prime suspect in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, ' Luigi the Musical ' is set to open on June 13 at the Taylor Street Theatre — and all five scheduled performances have already sold out. Developed by Nova Bradford, Arielle Johnson, André Margatini and Caleb Zeringue, the satirical stage production at the former Exit on Taylor will feature Mangione and a fictional rag-tag group of prison-mates: rapper Sean 'Diddy' Combs, who was charged with sex trafficking and racketeering last year, and fallen FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. '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, who produces and co-writes the show in addition to playing a guard, told the Chronicle. The satirical stage production is set at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center, and was in part inspired by the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, 'Chicago,' which features various cellblock numbers. It was written by Johnson and Bradford in the span of two months. But while the show is a comedy at heart, its creators said they want to make sure that the project doesn't undermine the severity of the allegations at hand. 'We're not valorizing any of these characters, and we're also not trivializing any of their actions or alleged actions,' Bradford said. 'Comedy inherently plays at the margins of social acceptability.' As the musical's premiere approaches, the real Mangione remains entangled in a federal murder case. Last month, the 26-year-old pleaded not guilty to four federal charges against him for the murder of Thompson in December. He is also facing charges in Pennsylvania and New York, the latter of which his legal team has filed a motion to dismiss under the argument that prosecuting Mangione in multiple states constitutes double jeopardy. His next court appearance is set for June 26.
The Hill
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hill
‘Luigi the Musical,' about accused UnitedHealthcare CEO killer, to debut in San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — From the killer barber of 'Sweeney Todd,' to Stephen Sondheim's 'Assassins,' musicals have long dealt with morbid subject matter. Now a musical comedy based on Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man accused of gunning down the CEO of a healthcare company, is on its way to San Francisco. 'Luigi the Musical,' is billed as: 'A story of love, murder and hash browns,' is due to open in June at the Taylor Street Theatre, formerly the Exit Theatre. Mangione, who was arrested as the prime suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and has pleaded not guilty in the case, shares the same real-life prison as FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs. Although it is unlikely he's actually cellmates with either, in the show, Mangione's character navigates 'friendship, justice, and the absurdity of viral fame,' with the two by his side, per the release. The show is described as a 'wildly irreverent, razor-sharp comedy that imagines the true story of Luigi Mangione, the alleged corporate assassin turned accidental folk hero.' The film features other famous characters, including convicted crypto-fraudster Bankman-Fried, and Combs, a former rap mogul turned accused sex trafficker. 'Bold, campy, and unafraid, ' Luigi: the Musical ' is both laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly thoughtful,' according to the play's production company. 'If you like your comedy smart and your show tunes with a criminal record, Luigi is your new favorite felony.' The show is directed by Nova Bradford and features original music and lyrics by Arielle Johnson. Johnson, Bradford, and co-writer Caleb Zeringue, are all involved in the local SF comedy scene. Andre' Margatini, another Bay Area comic, is also credited as a co-writer on the show. Mangione will be portrayed by Petaluma-based actor and comic, Jonny Stein, who admittedly bears some resemblance to the accused murderer. The 60-minute show makes its debut on Friday, June 13 and is currently scheduled for five sold-out performances.
