Interview: How LUIGI THE MUSICAL Is Pushing the Boundaries of Musical Theatre

Luigi: the Musical – a new comedy inspired by the reality of Luigi Mangione, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Diddy all being incarcerated in the same federal facility—has become a sold-out hit that’s now headed to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The musical is the result of four comedians from San Francisco’s comedy scene—Nova Bradford, Caleb Zeringue, Arielle Johnson, and Andre Margatini—deciding to combine their comedic chops with musical talent with a shared desire to create something socially resonant.

The show is a darkly funny one-act musical where healthcare, tech, and celebrity collide in a Brooklyn prison cell. Inspired by the true fact that Luigi Mangione, Diddy and Sam Bankman-Fried, three high-profile public figures were held simultaneously at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, the show is set in a prison cell shared by the disgraced crypto mogul, infamous media executive, and the viral Italian sensation and accused assassin, guarded by one confused Sergeant.

What starts as chaos turns into a surreal plan for freedom and unexpected fame. From fan mail to absurd schemes, Luigi discovers what happens when broken people become icons in a broken world. Wild, satirical, and complete with original music, this show asks who we choose to believe in when our institutions fall apart. 

Imagining the events of the short time that all three were in the same prison at the same time, Luigi uses absurdist humor and original music to explore corporate greed, public spectacle, and the creation of viral folk heroes in the internet age. Said head writer Nova Bradford, “the show really shines a light on the cultural obsession with downfall and redemption, as well as viral fame and the way violence is packaged and sold to us.”

The show has quickly drawn mixed attention from news outlets both excited, inspired, confused, and outraged by what they might imagine the show to be, but now the press can come experience the show for themselves. 

Before they begin performances at the Edinburgh Fringe on August 19, Zeringue, Bradford, and Margatini opened up about their creative process, how comedy can deepen hard conversations, and why they’re challenging the traditional ideas of what musical theater can be.

How did this collaboration come to be?

Nova: We're all friends who knew each other from the San Francisco stand up comedy community scene, which is a fairly tight knit group of performers. I had not been living in San Francisco for that long, but very quickly had gotten connected to the comedy community and was really struck and impressed by how wonderfully supportive of a creative environment it was. But then on the other hand, stand-up comedy can be pretty isolating. We can sort of fall into this pattern of writing our own jokes and performing them. I was really hoping for more opportunities for team-based collaboration. Through some conversations, particularly with our friend and colleague Ariel Johnson – who is the musical director of this production and is a comedy musician – we had the idea, broadly, that we wanted to create something in the musical theater space because we had the comedy skill set, had the music skill set, we had the performance skill set within our sort of local artistic community. The specific idea came from this true observation that Luigi Mangione and Sam Bankman-Fried and Diddy were all incarcerated in the same facility at the same time. I found that to be such an interesting confluence of strange bedfellows in a way that naturally anyone would look at that and think let's write a musical comedy about it.

Caleb: We did do open mics a lot at Hysteria and performed on showcase shows such as SafeWords, which is run by Jonah Price and Wonder Dave through Wonder Dave Productions. So they have fostered like a really collaborative comedy community that led to basically all of this, along with Tanna Simone of Comedy Q, which is over in East Bay.

Caleb and Andre, I understand scripted theater is a newer space for you?

Andre: You know, some people say that life is a stage, so in that way, not so much. No, I have done a lot of improv over the last 15 years, which I know is exactly not scripted, but I also was doing a lot of storytelling, which was like pseudo-scripted. So I've done a lot of different things on stage, some of it has been written some of it has not been. But this is certainly my first time playing a character who is not myself on stage.

Caleb: This is definitely my first time but I've been doing stand-up comedy for about a year and a half. But was recently in the New York Comedy Finals, is really cool. This is the LGBT LOL Fest, which is my hometown of New Orleans. So yeah, I've been very lucky with the comedy career so far and very grateful to Nova and Andre for the opportunity with this.

For any audience member, seeing the title of this musical might prompt them to do a double take. What do you hope that they take away from this? What would you hope that they know about Luigi: the Musical going into it?

Caleb: My most important thing is like, comedy doesn't mean lighthearted. Comedy is often used to explore like the hardest things in life. That's the reason I got into comedy. I was really struggling after my divorce and I used comedy to explore that. I also grew up in the South as a Catholic, which is great. No, it was very hard. So I used comedy to explore a lot of like the conversion therapy challenges I've gone through, the homophobia I faced down there. So I think we're really trying to tackle hard things in this musical using comedy to basically get people in in a safe way. And then really hit them in the face and make them think hard about all of the challenges in this play.

Andre: I'll add that like part of what is important for this story for us is the virality of Luigi Mangione existing far before we touched it as a written project and how the virality of him and this image being recreated is just one example of the ways that we are all feeling rather isolated from each other as we try to consume lots of different news stories at once and are exposed to all these different news stories at once. So in addition to comedy being kind of, as Caleb said, this sort of protective place to explore dark subjects, it was super important for all of us that we create something and work on something that actually allowed people to be sitting in the same space together and processing things. That adds a dimension to the project that I think is really important, which is that we're able to consume and dissect and explore this topic in a space where we're also embodied together in one shared space.

Nova: Something that we talked about a lot in creating this production is that viral stories sort of by nature are simple, right? There's sort of a lot of interesting and important social questions that are underneath the surface of what's going on with some of these viral stories that get missed in this sort of quick process of like sharing and moving on. What we see in sort of the current media landscape and how violence is being treated and sort of turned into entertainment actually represents something important that we need to deepen the conversation about. So part of what we're doing here, albeit in a fairly outrageous way, is to refocus attention on some of these deeper questions and use comedy as a way to sort of like invite the audience into that conversation in a way that feels acceptable. 

I feel like there is such a hunger for work like this right now. Is there anything else that you guys hope people take away from this or gain from coming to see this production?

Caleb: Why should Saturday Night Live and South Park get all the ability to process these current events? Why can't live theater musicals do that as well? I think that's one thing I really want to challenge is that we can't use musicals to do current events. I want to make people think that we can and I think we have.

Nova: Yeah, and something that we've noticed that I find noteworthy is that the audience that we're bringing in, and we've never yet had a show that didn't sell out, we are sort of bringing in a big audience, but they tend to be younger than the average musical theater audience, and they are often people who aren't necessarily musical theater people, which is interesting at a time where live performance is struggling. What we hear from our colleagues sort of across the theater world is that times are tough. We've found a way of tapping into new audiences who maybe are going to be musical theater fans in the future, but sort of have never been brought into this art form before. I think one of my hopes is that we can broaden who musical theater is for and send the message to people that we can put on a musical in a bar or in a club and people can have a phenomenal time. They can be left with some interesting questions. They can be left with a song stuck in their head and musical theater can be sort of accessible to different types of people in ways that it hasn't always been in the past.

Caleb: We've had multiple people repeat, come to the show, which is really interesting because like I love The Outsiders, but I only need to see it once, right? I would see it Oh, Mary! twice. I'd see it like three times. I think something about comedy really refreshes people's spirits. So I'm grateful for that as well.

Andre: I think what is really fun about it is that the four people on stage are experienced comedians. So to Nova's point that this is not maybe the same type of musical theater that people have seen, there's a certain easiness and a certain comfortable nature of our performing on stage that is like allowing for this to be a really engaging, in terms of the performance engaging with the audience and with current events. So we've kind of allowed ourselves to explore what needs to happen on stage for a musical because we're kind of messy and we're kind of flying by the seat of our pants, but we're also super smart. I can't say enough about my castmates and how brilliant they are in terms of adapting to both the thing that's happening on stage and the thing that's happening in whatever news updates we have. It's been really delightful to watch the kind of genre-bending nature of having four comedians on stage doing musical theater. I'm really just so impressed and in awe of the three people I'm on stage with who are doing that every night. It's quite different from a lot of musical musical theater performances.

Caleb: I want to brag about Andre real quick. The cast is all so good at inviting the audience to participate. Like the audience will get rowdy and have a reaction and they'll just like call it out and they'll make a joke about it. Andre broke my ass so hard because there's an end line where they're like, "We're patriots now." And then Andre said, "Just like Sydney Sweeney." That was such a great topical riff that you did, Andre. So I think that's something that we keep adding into the play is like current events, because they keep happening around these people.

You're headed to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It's obviously a cultured audience there, but to a new, different country and group of people, do you have any expectations for how the audience might perceive it there? 

Nova: I think it's definitely an experiment. We haven't shown this to any audiences outside of the United States yet. I'm really grateful that Edinburgh Fringe is the place that we get to do it. Because like you're saying, yes, it's a very cultured audience and also one that loves Fringe theater. So this sort of fly by the seat of our pants nature is something that that audience will appreciate. I am really excited to see sort of which aspects work, which aspects don't work. I think that every performance we do, we treat as a learning opportunity in the development of this production. So I think that we're gonna get really good feedback. The main hope is that the audience has a blast and just sort of having some preliminary conversations with people across the pond. A lot of the issues that we're tackling do really have an international reach given the global prominence of American media. For example, things like the commodification of violence in news media or the sort of pernicious influence of tech and finance. These are all things that are relatable to people sort of outside of the US as well, because they have their own versions of these issues and because of the prominence of American media. I'm really optimistic. I'm really excited. I can't wait.

Caleb: People keep asking if they think the message is going to resonate outside of the US. I'm like, well, like the Swedes asked this today. I'm like, you're here. All right, you know, I think it's working. Like, we've been interviewed by the Germans, the Canadians, the Swedes, like we made the front page of like Icelandic news. I am worried because they were like, they had to define what a hash brown is. So we don't know if they know what that is in the UK. So that is like, you know, scary for me. 

Caleb: This is a dream come true for me. Like my whole thing with comedy was to Josh Gad myself onto Broadway and I'm so grateful to even be talking to BroadwayWorld. I love musicals. I'm so grateful for the opportunity and I'm really happy to be a part of the musical world now.

Nova: I think the only thing that I would want to add is that people don't always think about San Francisco as a city with an incredible comedy scene, but it does and has for a long time. And I hope that what we can do with this production is show the entire world how funny we are in San Francisco. So I'm really glad that we are getting this kind of attention. My hope is that from that people want to ask more questions about the weird performance art going on in San Francisco, because we're operating in a long tradition of really incredible performers. Everything we're able to do here is because we're standing on their shoulders.