There’s a lot of heat if not much substance in “Murder Ballad,” the new rock opera now steaming up the intimate confines of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage II.
Starring Karen Olivo, Will Swenson and John Ellison Conlee as three points of a love triangle gone horribly wrong, Julia Jordan and Juliana Nash’s new musical lets you get up close and personal to their torrid goings-on.
How close? The theater’s been turned into a funky bar, and you’ll have a ringside seat at one of its tables as Sara (Olivo) breaks off her passionate affair with bar owner Tom (Swenson) when he refuses to commit. She finds solace, if not passion, in the arms of nice guy Michael (Conlee), settling into a comfortable married life and bearing a daughter. But years later she’s unable to resist when her hot ex-lover makes another play for her, resulting in the tragic denouement foretold by the title.
The entirely sung-through show is narrated by a Greek chorus of one (Rebecca Naomi Jones), who acerbically comments on the action.
“Listen, and I’ll tell a tale,” she sings at the beginning. “A tale where good does not prevail/A king, a queen, a club, a knave/One is destined for the grave.”
The thin storyline and barely defined characterizations never add up to much. But you’re swept up in the action anyway, thanks to Trip Cullman’s dynamic staging and Doug Varone’s choreography, which has the performers singing and dancing atop the bar, a pool table and inches from your seats: They’re literally in your face.
Normally, that might seem oppressive. But here it’s a pleasure to be assaulted by this talented and supremely sexy ensemble, as anyone who caught Swenson and Olivo’s star-making turns in “Hair” and “West Side Story,” respectively, can attest. Jones (“American Idiot”) is equally stunning as the narrator, and Conlee (“The Full Monty”) is warmly appealing as the cuckolded husband.
Jordan and Nash’s score consists of a relentless barrage of undistinguished rock numbers — sample lyric: “We are two cats in a fishbowl/We are two dogs in a boneyard” — but it’s propulsive enough to fuel the tight 80-minute running time.
You probably won’t care who winds up dead at the end of “Murder Ballad,” but you’ll enjoy being titillated along the way.