By BRUCE DENNILL
Thrill Me: The Leopold And Loeb Story / Directed by Christopher Weare / Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino Theatre, Fourways, Johannesburg
Making a musical about murderers feels like an odd fit, but this is an age where people choose to watch Netflix true crime documentaries before they go to bed, so no assumptions should be made about its appeal on that basis alone. Musical director Jaco Griessel, seated at a piano at the back of the stage throughout the show, is a formidable musician, and those who’ve heard him play before will know that that the material will be well served.
Aside from Griessel, Stephen Dolginoff’s compact musical is a two hander, with John Conrad (Nathan Leopold) and Gianluca Gironi (Richard Loeb) handling both the narrative – about two privileged, self-absorbed young men who commit ever-escalating crimes just to feel something more than the nihilism that they, ironically, spend day and night filling their minds with – and the dozen or more wordy songs (mostly duets, with the occasional solo number) that make up the score.
Those compositions serve a largely expository purpose, explaining the details of the characters’ individual and collective headspace rather than trying to provide hooks or motifs that link the scenes beyond the action. They are a marker of the energy level and precision that marks the production as a whole, as a large amount of text needs to be fitted into each bar to avoid falling behind Griessel’s constantly shifting fingers.
Another marker of this vigor is the choreography the characters constantly execute – shuffling, twirling and leaning across a raised performance area that is markedly smaller than the Pieter Toerien Theatre’s stage. Other than maintaining a certain level of dynamism, though, it’s an odd choice, as the characters often end up right up in each other’s personal space. While this makes a certain amount of sense given another aspect of the story – Leopold and Loeb’s twisted homosexual co-dependency – it doesn’t add to the unfolding details of their crime, and it plays a role in another staging issue. The bulk of the lighting is from the sides of the stage, and when the actors are in the regular close proximity the choreography requires, one is often casting a dark shadow on the other, with the obscured character often talking or singing at the time. Again, as an idea, it makes sense in that Thrill Me is a noir thriller and darkness and smoky ambience are par for the course, but in practice, it can be distracting. The same can sometimes be said for the raised platform on which Conrad and Gironi operate, which allows for the positioning of multiple props within easy reach but out of the audience’s eyeline, but which regularly creaks as the actors move around.
In terms of telling the story, Conrad and Gironi do well, particularly as neither Leopold nor Loeb is likeable, with the latter depicted as a flat-out psychopath convinced, thanks to his enthusiastic immersion in the works of Nietzsche, which have convinced him that he is a ‘superman’, intrinsically superior to all those around him and, crucially, impervious to the effects of the old-fashioned justice that applies to the normal plebs. Leopold is in thrall to his arrogant friend with benefits, and Conrad captures the almost manic intensity of a man wanting to be accepted by someone he loves while simultaneously being terrified of what that approval involved. He backs up this range of emotion with versatile vocals. Gironi’s Loeb is cold and confident, with his vocals correspondingly less demonstrative.
With no other characters and a narrative that paints Leopold and Loeb as men with little respect for the property or indeed life of anyone else – all the while never giving a convincing reason for those attitudes other than a bit of prompting from a grumpy philosopher – audience sympathy is hard to come by. That’s tempered by appreciation for the undoubted commitment of the performers, who put in a … killer effort.
