Salt Lake Acting Company’s regional premiere of Murder Ballad delivers the musical goods with provocative, feisty flair; the right lurid touches

One does not go to Murder Ballad, the wonderful musical by Juliana Nash and Julia Jordan, looking for meaty inventive and intelligent plot elements of a whodunit story. Man and Woman end their relationship, Woman meets New Man but still has feelings for first Man, cheats, and yada yada yada, the situation escalates, ending in a bloody act. 

But, as the regional premiere production by Salt Lake Acting Company proves, Murder Ballad’s visceral and dark lyricism, reminiscent of Neko Case and Jenny Lewis, combined with the sung-through narrative style that distinguished the musical Rent, more than compensate for the cookie-cutter template of plot elements.

Directed by Cynthia Fleming with the impeccable David Evanoff as music director, the show satisfies a banging rock hunger for theatrical bloodlust, with an excellent quartet of actors-singers led by the stellar Latoya Cameron as the narrator. All four deliver the emotional textures and nuances which galvanize the musical materials. 

The show opens with a bloodstained baseball bat, precisely situated on a pool table in a bar. With a voluptuous voice, Cameron sets the kickass vibes, as she introduces the love triangle. Sara (Collette Astle) has dated the equally sexy and hot Tom, the bartender (Gray Aydelott), but she ends up with Michael, a nerdish poet with a PhD in his pocket (M. Scott McLean). Parents of a newborn, Sara and Michael set up house but Sara is itching to escape the rut of stable, yet unexciting, family life. Sara gravitates back toward Tom, who now owns a club. To say more about the story would unfairly spoil the ending. 

Nash is the ideal composer. In the 1990s, her hard-rock band, Talking to Animals, was a Boston favorite. In an earlier interview published elsewhere, Nash said, “I think we were kind of like Pearl Jam, but with a female singer. We were really a great live band, and that was my wheelhouse.” The songs account for the lion’s share of the running time of 85 minutes. The band for this SLAC production shines throughout, with Evanoff at the keyboard, guitarist Mark D. Maxson, drummer Kendall White and Davin Tayler on bass. 

Even as conventional as Murder Ballad’s plot appears, the cumulative musical material gives room to audience members for contemplating the possibilities: Is there something more behind the intoxicatingly sultry personality of the narrator-host who holds back a crucial clue? Who will lose it first? We can forgive musicals which do not stand on the merit of significant plot foreshadowing. The epilogue in this show, however, is well chosen, giving enough space for audience members to sort out their reflective interpretation without stating something so obviously that it could insult their intelligence. The characters and their storylines are familiar to the point of relatability, which is sufficient. 

Murder ballads, like operas and musicals, make for marvelous studies of anthropology and ethnography because of how listeners bring their individual contexts into interpreting the lyrics and backgrounds of such songs. Jordan and Nash highlight the culture of a musical genre that opens the gate to exploring our longtime fascination with whodunits, especially when they involve crimes of passion. Murder Ballad is provocative and feisty with a soupçon of luridness.

Incidentally, Jordan is a cofounder of Lillys, which has heightened awareness of why women playwrights have not been represented as extensively as they should be in American theater. In 2023, the group briefly considered disbanding after declaring that the aggregate of theaters in New York City had achieved parity — meaning that playwright representation reflected in general the gender and racial demographics. However, at the same time, old habits have seeped back, courtesy of the antagonistic, racist and chauvinistic politics we’re currently experiencing. 

Fortunately, in Salt Lake City, theaters such as Salt Lake Acting Company, Pioneer Theatre Company, Plan-B Theatre, PYGmalion Productions and numerous small companies have done very well in demonstrating real parity in such artistic representation. It is public support that will be the best bulwark in this sociopolitical climate.

For this reason and others, Murder Ballad offers audiences a generous return on their investment of time, by keeping everybody on their toes and alert to the rock concert sensations embedded in this musical. Also, it is a wonderful sampler to whet everyone’s appetite for SLAC’s Summer Show: The Gaslight Zone, which opens June 24.

For tickets and more information about Murder Ballad, which continues through May 3, see the Salt Lake Acting Compamy website.