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SAN FRANCISCO — Backstage before Monday's performance of "Luigi: The Musical," actor Caleb Zeringue cracked a joke about how his castmate who plays the title role has to skip the show's European debut because such a trip could cost him his health insurance.
The barb strikes at one of the key themes in the show about alleged murderer Luigi Mangione: The whims of the U.S. health care system can drive people to do drastic things with fatal outcomes.
The lead actor, Jonny Stein, gets his health coverage through his day job teaching high school math in San Francisco. He said his principal denied his request to skip the first week of school so that he could perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival starting Tuesday, so another actor will be stepping in.
"Just because something's funny, doesn't mean it's not serious," said Zeringue, dressed as a prison guard, before Stein ducked out of the green room to slip into his bright orange jumpsuit.
Six months before this musical debuted in June, Mangione hit a nerve with the American public. Immediately after the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December, merchandise like pint glasses and baseball caps popped up carrying the phrase "Deny, Defend, Depose," the words emblazoned on ammunition casings found near where he was shot in Midtown Manhattan. After the then-26-year-old Mangione was arrested came the uncomfortable memes on social media with commentary on his appearance.
Now he's become a lightning rod for thinkpieces, viral TikToks, cult fandom and hand-wringing about the state of American medicine and making light of a murder case. And part of the debate over what Mangione represents is playing out in a scrappy musical.
When Nova Bradford, the show's 31-year-old director who also wrote it with a group of fellow Bay Area comedians, read that Mangione was being held in the same Brooklyn jail as disgraced crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, she thought the situation was ripe for satire.
"It's such a strange group of people to be in the same place at the same time. They're all high profile but from completely different worlds," Bradford said in a phone interview. "It's hard to imagine them being in the same room other than a prison cell."
Their worlds of tech and finance, entertainment and health care have all suffered a loss of public trust, Bradford said, through the Great Recession, Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, the #MeToo era, the opioid crisis and more.
When people see institutions failing, Bradford said, they're drawn to alternatives like new age healers on Instagram or biohacker bros in Silicon Valley - maybe even a vigilante. "But ultimately these people don't provide real answers, just like the institutions that are failing," said Bradford.
That disenchantment was evident at Monday night's sold-out "Luigi" show at the Independent, where an attendee was spotted in a Luigi T-shirt and the audience of around 200 roared in laughter as Bankman-Fried (André Margatini) sang about being a "Bay Area baby," growing up where it's normal to fake it till you make it and about how "you gotta have a little fraud in your company."
Before the show, a 31-year-old accountant in the audience proclaimed the show was made for people like her, a former theater kid and self-described "Hamilton liberal" who now considers herself a "Luigi leftist."
"It's not that I believe in violence against the individual," Kathleen Koomen said. "But I do believe that a state that monopolizes violence begets violence, and I think Luigi represents that."
Stephanie Allen, a 50-year-old mortgage broker who'd traveled from Napa to see the show, was intrigued by the satirical take on a serious subject. The United States "is one of the richest countries in the world," Allen noted. She dropped an expletive when describing how she feels about the lack of affordable health care, adding: "Why is this happening?"
The San Francisco Chronicle's review says the production is "the most talked-about play in S.F. It's also terrible." The writer is among several who've suggested it might be too soon to tackle Mangione's case onstage, earnestly asking: "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?"
The show opens with disclaimer reminding attendees not to take what is about to unfold too seriously. It's satire and such speech is protected by the First Amendment, a disembodied voice says, spurring anxious chuckles from the crowd.
The characters' varied worlds is played for laughs, conflict and, ultimately, a few notes of harmony. The show points out that Bankman-Fried and Diddy (Janeé Lucas) are both businessmen who love money and the spotlight. Luigi, the relative nobody, becomes a kind of peacemaker between the two famous men. He's also the only one getting fan mail while in prison, with fictional yet relatable tales of sickness, pain and denied health-care claims.
Sure, the actors' voices and dance moves aren't the smoothest. The between-act set changes are a little clumsy. Every show, a different actor fumbles a handful of lines, Zeringue admitted.
But the production's amateur nature is also the source of its charm. The bumbling feels appropriate when lampooning these men in various stages of felony cases. With such messy muses, why not lean into the improv of it all?
Bradford cited "Chicago" as one of her influences, as it's another true-crime satire set in a prison, as well as "Avenue Q" and "Book of Mormon," two boundary-pushing musicals that were formative in her upbringing as a theater kid in Colorado. The show joins a long line of musicals about controversial real-life characters, ranging from more serious, like "Hamilton" and "Evita," to the more gimmicky, like "Gwyneth Goes Skiing" and TV's "Prince Andrew: The Musical."
Bradford finds her show draws younger crowds than the typical musical. And by building a production around three very different characters, "we're able to have jokes … that appeal to audiences who have different media they're familiar with, and different comedy preferences," said Bradford, who's in talks to bring "Luigi" to Los Angeles and New York after Edinburgh.
Eve Hroziencik is one of those young theatergoers. The 23-year-old brought her dad along as a birthday gift. Her father, Mike, who works as a criminal defense lawyer in nearby Burlingame, said he thought the show was "hilarious and ridiculous."
Hroziencik said "Luigi" made her "hopeful" about the future because the show's "humor and absurdity makes all the misery of the world a little more bearable."