Captivating performances illuminate the dark twists of Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story

John Conrad and Gianluca Gironi as the so-called 'Thrill Killers' in 'Thrill Me – The Leopold & Loeb Story' now playing at Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town (Photograph: Supplied by the author)

By Keith Bain

28 Feb 2025

For 80 incredible minutes, accompanied by little more than a single piano and your undivided attention, the actors in Thrill Me absolutely own the stage.

Starting with the moment that actor John Conrad entered stage left, floorboards creaking underfoot as he ventured across the raised platform before turning to make his appeal to the disembodied parole board represented by the audience, my attention never wavered for an instant.

For 80 minutes I sat rapt, transfixed by the precise performances and gripping energy of Conrad and fellow actor Gianluca Gironi who are currently singing, acting and sweating their way through Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story, a tight, taut, two-hand musical playing at Cape Town’s Theatre on the Bay.

The show, set in Chicago, is an inventive account of what was, in 1924, referred to as the “crime of the century”.

From court documents, interviews and other source material, playwright and songwriter Stephen Dolginoff has concocted a perfectly propulsive true-crime saga that creatively imagines the inner workings and lamentable repercussions of the strange sexual relationship and sordid compulsions of a pair of law students.

It’s as much about the murder of a 14-year-old boy apparently chosen at random to be their victim as it is a scintillating character-driven drama about the killers’ twisted co-dependency.

They — the brazenly narcissistic Richard Loeb and his needy, sexually fixated friend-with-benefits, Nathan Leopold — earned considerable notoriety during their trial, not only because they seemed to have killed for the mere thrill of it, but also because of their homosexual entanglement.

Compelling

It is not a “whodunnit?” but a “why’d-they-do-it?”, a story that’s as compelling for what it’s unable to tell us about the reasons for committing a heinous and brutal murder as it is a seductive account of a tempestuous affair of the heart.

The details — of both their rocky romance and their callous crime — are revealed through the lens of Leopold’s confession at his parole hearing after being incarcerated for 33 years; if his story’s to be believed, his fatal flaw was that he’d been so lethally addicted to Loeb, that — in return for physical intimacy — he was willing to do his bidding no matter the cost.

Loeb, meanwhile, was evidently infatuated only with himself, convinced of his intellectual superiority and driven by some inexplicable impulse to commit acts of what we might imagine to be pure evil.

Conrad’s Leopold constructs his memory of events in an attempt to win over the parole board and to make those of us in the audience experience a kind of retroactive sympathy for a sensitive, anxious youngster who’d fallen in love with his childhood best friend. Gironi’s Loeb, meanwhile, spews Nietzschean nihilism, is unapologetically opportunistic, and has an almost fanatical disdain for what he deems to be base human traits — such as sympathy.

If you’re familiar with Hitchcock’s Rope, a perfect contained chamber film about a pair of gay lovers who commit a murder for the sake of getting away with it, or if you’ve more recently watched Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, you will have some sense of the slightly impenetrable and deeply perplexing psychological landscape that this musical taps into.

John Conrad and Gianluca Gironi as the so-called 'Thrill Killers' in Thrill Me – The Leopold & Loeb Story. (Photograph: Supplied by the author)

One conceit here, though, is the dramatic compression of its story into an intimate intrigue between two characters. It’s as though the reality Leopold and Loeb inhabit is a kind of isolated, insular world they’ve constructed for themselves, that they’re impervious to everyday logic and morality.

Observing this two-man universe, absorbed by the bizarre dynamics of their relationship, the audience is aware of the coming horror preempted by Loeb’s initial fascination with petty crime and his love of arson — you suspect early on that his real desire is to burn down the world, his face a cipher for some immense cruelty lurking behind his sharp intelligence and his sly, charming smile.

Gironi’s face essentially becomes a kind of metaphor for guile, evidence of how cool desirability can be a place to conceal an infinitude of treacherous inclinations.

Conrad, meanwhile, succeeds in serving up heartache, making emotional appeals to the audience: his pleas for empathy start soon after that very first cautious, calculated walk across the stage, when he turns to us and sucks us in with his account of how, once upon a time, he’d been a lovestruck youngster who’d simply fallen for the wrong guy.

The show’s other welcome conceit is the fact of the musical itself.

By dragging what is an undeniably ugly slice of historical fact into the campy, slightly unreal world of show tunes and harmonies used to imaginatively explore the story’s deeper — and quirkier — dimensions, there’s a suspension of disbelief as the occasionally amusing lyrics provide unexpectedly entertaining twists and turns.

Suspensive thrills aside, it’s actually quite a lot of fun, as if Dolginoff’s songs have a liberating effect on the story, removing it from the suffocating confines of tragedy and providing the characters with space for introspection, self-reflection, even a few ironic rhyming quips.

Punchy

Dolginoff’s writing is punchy, the music — performed on a piano that’s visible in the background by the formidable Jaco Griessel, who is also the musical director — works like a movie score, like it’s part of the action.

The songs stretch across a range of moods and emotions. Some are light, some darkly witty, while others serve up a real slice of something sinister and unsettling, such as when the Gironi channels Loeb at his most charming in order to successfully convince a young stranger to get into the car that will seal his fate as their murder victim.

It’s one of those tantalising, yet spine-tingling, scenes alerting you to the fact that coursing through his veins there is some form of diabolical evil, and that as fantastic and fun to watch as he is, he is also a sociopath who no doubt gets a thrill from hurting small animals. And yet, you’d probably hop in that car, too.

The convoluted relationship between the two young murderers pulses with the push and pull of love and loathing, of acrimonious disdain and irrational devotion to someone cruel and calculating. The intensity of it, not to mention the precision of their movements, which director Chris Weare has plotted almost as though they are doing a subtly choreographed dance, means your interest never dips for a moment.

That the actors have such a remarkable grip on the audience’s attention has a lot to do with their solid grasp of the material, how expertly they’ve honed their craft and attended to the technical and emotional layering of their characters, not to mention how much of their hearts and souls they’ve thrown into the work.

Their commitment is staggering, the effortlessness of their hard work betrayed only by the sweat you’ll see beading across their brows, dripping down their cheeks.

And there’s a twist, of course, a didn’t-see-this-coming revelation where you’re left wondering if any part of the story can in fact be trusted.

After all, we’re watching a 100-year-old tale of abduction and murder related to us by a man who’d spent most of his life behind bars for his part in a crime that made no sense whatsoever. Which makes the fact that you’ll probably be humming your favourite tune on the way home all the more extraordinary. DM

Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story plays at Theatre On The Bay in Cape Town until 15 March 2025, and at Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino theatre in Johannesburg from 21 March until 13 April.

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Compelling

Punchy