Bonus Episode: Buddy Cianci...The Musical

Inside the world’s best (well, only) Fringe Festival-approved, Off-Off-Broadway, speed-written, side-splittin’, six-night-run-and-then-we’re-done musical about everyone’s favorite felonious mayor.

In 2003, a couple of Brown University alumni did the unthinkable: they wrote and performed a musical about everyone’s favorite criminal mayor. No recordings of the play exist today. So, as a holiday gift to Crimetown listeners, we’ve asked some friends in the musical-theater business to resurrect this forgotten classic.

To listen to the Buddy Cianci: The Musical soundtrack, and for more information about this episode, visit our website at crimetownshow.com. 

Welcome to Crimetown, a series produced by Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier in partnership with Gimlet Media. Each season, we investigate the culture of crime in a different city.

In Season 2, Crimetown heads to the heart of the Rust Belt: Detroit, Michigan. From its heyday as Motor City to its rebirth as the Brooklyn of the Midwest, Detroit’s history reflects a series of issues that strike at the heart of American identity: race, poverty, policing, loss of industry, the war on drugs, and our universal desire for a savior. Detroit’s a tough town, and its residents are even tougher. They’ve weathered riots, a drug epidemic, political scandal, and innumerable other hardships, but they’re still here—and they have stories to tell.