A dark comedy about Baltimore County native Luigi Mangione’s incarceration is headed to New York City this summer, the creative team behind the show announced.
“Luigi: The Musical” follows Mangione while he’s jailed alongside disgraced music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs and cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried at Metropolitan Detention Center after being accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
After selling out every date while at The Independent in San Francisco last year and five shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, the show is making its East Coast debut at The Green Room 42 in New York on June 15.
The show has four actors playing the three famous inmates and a prison guard, performing original songs by creators Nova Bradford and Arielle Johnson. In the musical numbers, Bankman-Fried sings about being a “Bay Area Baby,” Combs harmonizes about “a Diddy soiree” and Mangione belts out a tune about hash browns — a nod to police capturing him at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.
Ben Rimalower, programming director The Green Room 42, said the cabaret venue had already sold over 300 tickets to those interested in seeing the reading of “Luigi: The Musical.” An actor and director himself, Rimalower said he’s impressed with the creators’ abilities to create work that grapples with societal issues of today.
The production doesn’t answer why health care is so expensive, nor why someone of affluent means would commit such a crime, Rimalower said. The show is a comedy more about those among us who’ve made a celebrity, even a martyr, of Mangione.
“Our society is obsessed with criminals,” Rimalower said. “This play really intelligently makes fun of our society’s obsession with that.”
The theater has gotten pushback online, but Rimalower said it’s been overshadowed by the bulk of people excited to see the production.
“It’s a story that’s on everyone’s minds,” Rimalower said. “People don’t want to wait! They want that entertainment right away.”
The spectacle of Mangione’s case is a great source of inspiration for the musical. The show’s creators said in a news release they sought to reimagine “larger-than-life public figures as exaggerated characters representing three disillusioned pillars of American life: healthcare, Hollywood, and tech.” Beneath the comedy of it all, creators said, lies social commentary on “how violence is packaged and consumed in American media.”
“‘Luigi: The Musical’ uses comedy to bring deeper questions to the surface,” Bradford, the show’s creator, writer, director and co-lyrist said in a news release. “Why did this case garner the reaction that it did? And what happens when people stop trusting their institutions?”
Creators push back on the sentiment that the show glorifies violence, saying it examines the topic. The 90-minute, no-intermission show in New York will be a staged reading, not a full production. It was meant to be one night, but the virality and increasing popularity that brought it to the city in the first place pushed creators to add two shows.
The show will run until June 18. Tickets range from $29-$79, and those interested must be at least 21 years old to attend.
Although it may turn off some people, having a musical about a handsome white man who most of the world learned about after he fatally shot someone feels like a “deeply American thing,” said Jason Loviglio, a media historian and author.
“This is part of a very long tradition of making popular culture out of outlaws,” Loviglio, who also teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said.
The fact that Mangione was jailed with two people who were prominent before their alleged crimes made his story primed for show business and an opportunity to unpack where society stands on capitalism, he said.
Blackman-Fried represents those trying to use money for good but ending up being fraudulent, Combs embodies the American dream as a major record executive from humble beginnings before his fall from grace, and Mangione receives praise for shooting a health care executive because of people’s issues with the industry, Loviglio explained.
“Each one of those guys represent a different version of ‘capitalism is in trouble,’” Loviglio said.
Mangione is a scion of local real estate developers and philanthropists and has a cousin running for Baltimore County Council. He was valedictorian of the prestigious Gilman School’s class of 2016 and is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania.
Mangione was catapulted into the national spotlight after allegedly shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel in December 2024. After killing the executive with bullets inscribed with “deny,” “defend” and “depose,” the language used to deny insurance claims, authorities said, Mangione gained support from people fed up with the health care industry.
Lily Janiak, a theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, criticized the show for poor staging and the quality of its music, among other concerns. However, the play finds its heart in Mangione’s conversation with a guard surrounding health insurance woes, she notes. Amanda Hess, critic at large for The New York Times, wrote that it’s “striking how measured ‘Luigi: The Musical’ really is” and how it ignites conversations about the moral questions surrounding Mangione’s celebrity.
Mangione faces federal and state murder charges. His trial in New York is slated to begin in June as this production debuts.