First, a land acknowledgement:
The Edmonton Fringe takes place on
white man's land. This has always been white man's land, before his
arrival this was an empty continent filled with banished Mongolians who
achieved nothing other than stealing the untouched land from the
previous wave of untouching Mongolians. Everything great that has been
built on this land came from the white man, and his glory over it we
acknowledge here today.
Do you like those Netflix true crime documentaries? The thrill of learning the details of a grisly murder, or the intricacies of the police investigation, the red herrings, the dead ends, the final pieces of evidence coming together, a mystery being "solved" right before your eyes? The true stories of cases which may or may not have been solved, and interesting developments along the way?
You're in luck: "Cabaret of Murder" has exactly zero of any of these things.
What it does have is a musically theatrical examination of the creative output of known and notorious mass murderers. Did you ever want a dramatic interpretation of Erik Menendez's screenplay of a rich boy who kills his parents to inherit the family fortune (written two years before the killings)? That, my friends, that you get. The poems, plays, screenplays, and songs -- almost all accepted by the playwright as horrible -- being performed by three women: Nipply Redhead (Bella Ciccone), Low Cut Shirt Latina (Paulina Pino Rubio) and Big-Boobs (Kaite-Rose Connors). (For those curious about the exception to "somewhat all", Charles Manson kinda wrote music for the Beach Boys)
The show is fairly breezy and scenes generally don't feel like they run on too long: the direction is quick and succinct enough to avoid long drawn out stretches, and the show's comedy (more on that in a second) is interspersed enough to help you get over the fact that mass murders don't seem particularly capable of telling an engaging or cohesive story. One of the best bits is when Low Cut Shirt Latina is providing Menendez's screenplay stage directions to Big-Boobs; Big-Boobs seems uninterested in or incapable of delivering lines and taking actions with the emotional motivations indicated in the script, and the "script" gets increasingly agitated as the stage direction is routinely ignored. After the first of two plays by Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho is performed, one of the women warns us that this was the "better" of the two. I actually think the latter was the more engaging work, but then I also thought the only decent poem performed all night was the one which they dubbed "the worst poem they had ever heard". Did they not notice all the earlier ones which weren't as good? Maybe the Spanish language one (bonus points if you guess which actress read out the original while Big-Boobs translated it) was good in its native tongue, the translated version was...well, translated poetry.
So while not exactly a true crime story that would rival the ages, it was certainly interesting if not necessarily inherently entertaining to see what sort of artistic output these mass murderers were capable of. Which leads me to an interesting omission: while he (almost certainly) wasn't a mass murderer, Edmonton is the home of the infamous POF Killer Mark Twitchell, who along with a Star Wars fanfilm which you can watch parts of on YouTube, also wrote a screenplay similar to the Menendez Brothers which almost perfectly paralleled his own later crimes. I don't know if the screenplay was ever released or even how much of it was written (we know he had at least some written material plus an outline of the plot, he had shown it to police to explain why he had filmed scenes with "fake" blood in the garage), but it certainly would have been nice to see.
Finally, if you have seen this show and think it was laugh out loud hysterical at numerous points, please note so in the comments. I thought it was cute in parts, but in particular one girl near the front thought it was laugh-out-loud hilarious on at least three different occasions, and while the crowd chuckled during a couple humorous breaks from the dark subject matter, there was only a couple people who laughed quite prodigiously and almost always at Nipply Redhead which makes me think they might be friends or family.
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