Lizzie Borden

Took An Axe Productions
Hillary Richard, Executive Producer
Peter McCabe, Producer

presents

LIZZIE BORDEN
by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, Tim Maner, and Alan Stevens Hewitt

A rock roadshow retelling of the bloody legend of America’s first and favorite axe-wielding double-murderess and Victorian hometown girl, Lizzie Borden.

“It must have been a foreigner, a lunatic, a beast!
But it’s just us girls in the house of Borden.”

Lizzie Borden took an axe. Gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, gave her father forty-one. In 1892 on a sweltering August day in a small New England town, “somebody” brutally murdered a well-to-do elderly man and his second wife with an axe. Lizzie Borden, their young daughter, was named the primary suspect, arrested and tried. Without any witnesses to the hideous crime, she was acquitted and the murder remains unsolved to this day. Though Lizzie was ultimately declared innocent according to the law, her infamy lives on.

The rock musical LIZZIE BORDEN enters the horrifying Borden household to explore these notorious events through the eyes of Lizzie, her older sister Emma, Lizzie’s close friend Alice and the housemaid Bridget. Why would Lizzie do it? Who else knew what happened? How could she get away with the violent murder of her parents in broad daylight? Through original songs performed by four fierce rockers accompanied by a live band, this driving musical presents a tale of repression, patricide and two very bloody murders—and reveals why Lizzie Borden may have taken up that axe.

The earliest incarnation of this show, entitled LIZZIE BORDEN: AN AMERICAN MUSICAL, debuted in summer 1990 at the Ohio Theatre, produced by Tiny Mythic Theatre Company as part of The American Living Room (TALR). Its two-night run was a sold-out hit. This one-act version was based on actual trial transcripts presented in operetta-style original rock songs with live drums, bass, and guitar.

Later, LIZZIE BORDEN: A ROCK AND ROLL SHOW, the second incarnation of this work, enjoyed a two-week run in September 1994 at HERE Arts Center. In this version, the cast was backed by Staten Island metal band Stealth, and fake blood was liberally splattered on the stage.

Most recently the show ran for six weeks in fall 2009 at the Living Theatre in New York as a full-length original rock musical, produced by Took An Axe Productions.