This two-man musical is a very odd beast indeed. It essentially takes the form of an eighty-minute love duet, full of declarations of passion, mutual groping, and fiery disputes. The heady romance of the piece is only slightly diminished by the fact that what brings these two together is arson, theft, and finally the murder of a young child. Taken from the true story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the 1920s Chicago law students who killed simply for the “thrill”, I must say I was unsure of whether or not this show passed the taste test.

It is well-performed by Robin Morton and Robert Thomas as Leopold and Loeb, respectively. Morton is the better actor while Thomas is the better singer. Loeb, the more obviously psychotic of the two, is a difficult part to play, and Thomas usually goes for the obvious menacing tics of the madman – the glassy smile and the cold eyes – rather than make us believe in a character of depth. Morton’s Leopold, on the other hand, is almost believable, impressive considering how unlikely it seems that this mild man would be so taken with his lust for his friend that he would countenance murder. Morton pushes all the nervy, eager-to-please angst he can into his wide eyes, and it makes us almost sympathise.

Almost. The problem with the show is that I didn’t know where it was placing itself on the sympathy scale. Making a musical of such a dark subject allows you to either go very serious or blackly comic, and this hovered between them. A song about the warm, romantic fire of a barn set alight is over-the-top and funny, but this jars with the later description of the abduction and murder of an eleven-year-old. When Loeb takes out his weapons from a chest his face is lit by red light in a pantomimic style – is this deliberately over the top? If that was the case, then the pace needed to be faster, the energy more frantic, the chemistry between the leads more sparking.

A late song about abducting a child shows exactly the problem – the lyrics are creepy, but when taking on such a subject, it needs to be more: it needs to be incisive and surprising too. Still, there is a sense in which the musical form is the only way this story could be told, as a sequence of increasingly overwrought emotional battles between the two, both of whom take themselves a little too seriously. There’s a Nietzschean thread running through it all: “we are above society!” yells Loeb a little too heavy-handedly at one point. I was only really satisfied with the show when the delicious conclusion provided untermensch Leopold a fittingly ubermensch-ish victory.

Director Mhari Gallagher has chosen a strange play to put on, and I’m not entirely sure its quality justifies its extreme content, but it is at least interesting. If the rhymes and music aren’t the most interesting you’ll hear, at least you’re unlikely to hear many extended duets that combine blatant homoeroticism with plans of murder.