At the center of the musical version of John Berendt’s saga of life in Savannah is a killing. Middle-aged antiques dealer Jim Williams is accused of shooting Danny Hansford, a bit of rough trade who, shall we say, has both a day and a night job with Williams.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is far from the first musical about an alleged or convicted murderer. Roxie Hart in Chicago took care of her boyfriend; Velma Kelly her cheating husband. They were acquitted. Let’s not forget Sweeney Todd who pays for his crimes. Chicagois one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history. Sweeney Todd is revived regularly. Why doesn’t Midnight in the Garden of Evil work? One reason is that the writing and performances don’t make us root for Jim Williams and Danny Hansford. They are basically unpleasant people who need some likability. The wonderful perversion of Chicago and Sweeney Todd is that the audience ends up on the side of the killers. In Tom Hewitt’s performance, Jim Williams doesn’t have the old Southern charm the character needs, particularly when he has half a dozen songs to sing. His singing, by the way, is far from effortless. Jim Williams is just plain nasty to Danny, but nothing in Austin Colby’s performance or Taylor Mac’s writing for Danny makes the audience care about him. He’s just a nasty piece of business. Hewitt, who is in his mid-60s, is a decade or two too old for the part. Should Jim be old enough to be Danny’s grandfather? If we don’t care about either man, the issue of whether or not Jim is guilty of Danny’s death doesn’t seem very important.

As a result, the success of the show hangs on J. Harrison Ghee’s fabulous performance as Lady Chablis. Ghee has star written all over him/her/them. They have the charisma and charm a big musical needs. The show comes to life every time Ghee is onstage. Alas, Lady Chablis’s story has nothing to do with the main plot.   

The most gaping hole in the show is the forgettable score by Jason Robert Brown. Brown has written a couple of the best scores of the past thirty years. Parade is a classic and Brown’s score to The Bridges of Madison County (yes, the musical!) is one of my favorites. Neither show was a hit on its first outing, and Brown has a strange reputation of writing decent scores for weak shows (Honeymoon in Vegas, Mister Saturday Night, Urban Cowboy). This is not one of Brown’s stronger scores. His cleverest lyrics are for Jim Williams, but even there the lyrics need to help make us root for the man. They don’t.

Veteran Sierra Boggess does all she can with the chief society lady, Emma Dawes, but she and the ladies outstay their welcome. One song from them would be enough. Boggess is a real trouper, but there is almost an air of desperation in her efforts to put across weak material. She’s had worse to work with–she was the lead in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s disastrous sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies.

Taylor Mac has tried to weave together all the key threads of John Berendt’s book. He tries to parallel Jim William’s rise and fall and rise to that of Lady Chablis. They are both performers in their way—the self-made piss-elegant Southern queen and the drag queen who is, to quote La Cage aux Folles, her “own special creation.” Neither is ever going to fully belong. If the show is going to go anywhere after Chicago, the parallels have to be drawn more vividly. The song “Restoration” midway through the second act starts to do that, but we should see the kinship between these characters more clearly from the beginning. And the performer playing Jim needs to be as fabulous in his way as Lady Chablis is. Only then will the show take off. 

The problem may be in Rob Ashford’s direction. From the outset, he plays up the voodoo and racial history of Savannah, but they aren’t what the show is about. The show is about two queer folk trying to survive in their segments of Charleston society. That should have been his focus from the moment the show starts.

All the other aspects of the show—Christopher Oram’s skeletal sets, Toni-Leslie James’s costumes, and Neil Austin and Jamie Platt’s lighting were fine. The choreography (Tanya Birl-Torres) is as blah as the score.

Seeing a new musical in Chicago is always exciting. We in the audience speculate on the show’s future. If the necessity corrections in writing, composing and casting were made, would a show like this succeed in the current Broadway lineup of glitzy jukebox musicals. Would current Broadway audiences shell out the current outrageous prices to see a musical about a gay man who kills his young sociopathic lover? The top-grossing shows on Broadway last week were still family fare—The Lion King and Wicked. I wouldn’t invest in this one.