We know upon entering the Flatiron Arts Center's smaller studio—reconfigured into the King's Club on Manhattan's Lower East Side, complete with drinks, tables and a few elevated seats for the more cautious and/or less thirsty—that before our play is over, somebody will kill somebody else: The band invites us to sing along with a rockabilly version of the venerable broadside ballad "Tom Dooley" and, in the very first song, our storyteller reaffirms the promise of the show's title.
What we don't know yet is who will be the killer and the victim, and (significantly) who will be held responsible for the crime. Nor are we going to learn the answers (until the very last moments) of Julia Jordan and Juliana Nash's pop opera recounting the cautionary tale of two urban waifs—"naive, ambitious and underfed"—who eventually achieve security and stability, only to succumb to the lure of their lusty past, making for predictably tragic results. Following 70 minutes of passion, sacrifice, betrayal, passion, fury, despair, vengeance and more passion, blood is spilled and we learn our narrator's part in deciding the fate of slaves to love.
This long-shopworn plot (albeit alleviated by a surprise reversal in its final seconds) is the vehicle for Nash's gritty-edged score evoking romantic recklessness and Apache dance eroticism, embodied in a duet extolling the thrills of "a kiss like a mouth tattoo." Director/choreographer—the two are inseparable in quarters as close as these—James Beaudry weaves the action through the audience to generate an intimacy necessitating, at one point, Amanda Horvath's parading in spike heels atop a bench barely wider than an Olympic-regulation balance beam and, at another, bringing a knife-carrying Chris Logan within inches of spectators' laps.
Under Nicholas Davio's music direction, the electronic amplification of Murder Ballad makes for uniform audibility, though intelligibility was somewhat compromised on opening night by the acoustically reflective surfaces often found in landmark buildings of this vintage.
Don't be too eager to declare your superiority regarding sordid tales of visceral justice, however. Jordan and Nash are not content to let us go home with our smug complacencies intact, instead sending us on our way pursued by a gleeful reminder that sweaty sex and brutal violence is precisely what we came seeking. "It's just entertainment—until it happens to you!," the characters taunt us. Don't say you weren't warned.
