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Step aside “Chicago,” there’s a new show in town that glamorizes celebrity criminals. Featuring alleged sex trafficker Sean Diddy Combs, convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, and alleged assassin Luigi Mangione, “Luigi: The Musical” brings all three together in a supposed satire comedy.
I walked in with an open mind, assuming the show would lampoon the trio and the fact that they were once all housed at the same Brooklyn prison, the Metropolitan Detention Center. Musical theater doesn’t necessarily shy away from tackling sensitive subjects and sacred cows. “The Producers,” a musical by Jewish filmmaker Mel Brooks, includes a love song to the Third Reich, “Springtime for Hitler.” “The Book of Mormon,” written by the creators of South Park, roasts the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Surely, “Luigi” would mock its subject as well.
It turns out, it only pretended to do that. On Thursday night in Hell’s Kitchen, I learned that the crowd was attending not just to laugh but to show their support for a certain message.
“It tells you a lot that this place is packed,” the guy next to me said. “It was bad what he did, but the CEO wasn’t a good guy.”
He said his office is on the Midtown block where the shooting took place. The girl behind me in line to get into the venue said the show had been such a blockbuster success in Manhattan that it added two more show times. Safe to say, there were a lot of Mangione sympathizers in the house. They were eager for validation, and the show delivered.
The first signal of the show’s agenda came when Mangione broke out into a humorous ballad that quickly turned serious. Titled “All for a Smile,” the song details how Mangione was ultimately caught by authorities because he pulled down his mask at a youth hostel check-in to smile at a staff member, exposing his identity to the security cameras.
“I shouldn’t have bought those hash browns,” the actor laments about his character’s subsequent visit to a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, where he sat brooding over a table with his manifesto and the gun he allegedly used to commit the crime.
“A martyr’s life is what I chose,” he belts with an indignant passion.
The show’s tone suggests that Mangione was not some calculating monster but a principled man and a reluctant killer. I realized halfway through the show that the intention behind including the disgraced music giant and crypto entrepreneur in the story was so they could serve as foils to Mangione’s more noble motivations.
Desperate for fame and fortune, Bankman-Fried and Combs are peas in a pod, while Mangione is the odd one out in this band of misfits. The rapper and the nerd exchange witty banter that culminates in their (fictional) gay relationship. While Bankman-Fried defines “venture capitalism” as investing in startups in exchange for capital, Combs remarks that he basically does the same thing by investing in the potential of his strippers. As they formulate a prison escape plan, Bankman-Fried muses that they could finance their heist through a “classic pump and dump,” by which he means artificially driving up the value of an asset and then shorting it for quick cash. Combs says that he too is familiar with the pump and dump, but that it means something different at his Hamptons white parties.
All these clever double entendres are meant to show that whether white collar crime or sexual exploits, it’s all the same evil. Those two fiends were hungry for money, power, and pleasure. Mangione, on the other hand? He is simply accused of gunning down a father and a husband in cold blood for the altruistic purpose of avenging victims of the healthcare industry (who apparently don’t understand that buying insurance doesn’t mean the company covers every claim). That was the obvious conclusion of the show.
As an Australian guy I talked to put it, speaking about Mangione and Combs, respectively, “This one’s warranted, and this one’s nasty.”
I questioned him about Australia’s nationalized healthcare system, which he praised as quite functional. He suggested nothing violent would ever happen in Australia because of grievances with corporate greed. Maybe not, but it recently experienced antisemitic terrorists spraying bullets at Jews celebrating Hanukkah on the beach.
When I asked if there were long wait times to see a doctor in Australia, the guy replied, “Oh, yeah.”
That’s a major caveat of universal healthcare that progressives in America haven’t had to endure and therefore haven’t given much thought to. Nowhere in the show was the necessary nuance about why our healthcare system is so convoluted and seemingly capricious. Like, the fact that government intervention has overcomplicated it six ways to Sunday. The coexistence of government programs and private insurers forces healthcare providers to navigate a complex labyrinth of billing codes, rules, and claims processing, making administrative expenses account for nearly 25% of all healthcare spending.
With tears in his eyes, Mangione reads letters from fan girls and fitness chads with serious injuries and medical conditions, treatment for which their insurance companies denied. The show ends with the prison guard taking Mangione to solitary confinement, where he confesses in soap opera fashion that he, too, requested coverage for a debilitating health problem that United Healthcare denied. Moved by Mangione’s cause, the guard gives him his gun back to bust out of the clink. Prison corruption and murder to own the health insurance complex!
The claim that the musical was a satire was a massive stretch. It’s not a satire if it picks and chooses which characters, all of whom did or allegedly did very immoral things, to criticize. It was whiplash-inducing to keep up with when the left-wing editorializing starts and stops. The most abrupt transition comes after the prison guard has at length justified Mangione’s vendetta with his sob story. With a lyric that lands as more sincere than satirical, the final song proclaims, “We’ll shoot everybody until there’s peace on earth.”
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Caroline Downey is a columnist and video personality at National Review. She is also a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a 2025-2026 Novak fellow with the Fund for American Studies.
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