The Play
A Gentleman’s Guide
to Love & Murder
A 2014 Tony-winning musical comedy. Book and lyrics by Robert L. Freedman, music and lyrics by Steven Lutvak. Adapted from Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal, the 1907 public-domain novel by Roy Horniman.
A nearly-broke young man in Edwardian London learns he is ninth in the line of succession to an earldom — and proceeds, with extraordinary politeness, to remove the eight people standing in his way. One actor plays all eight victims. The score is a knowing pastiche of patter songs, parlour ballads, and the kind of three-part counterpoint that turns murder into farce.
The show opened on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 17 November 2013 after an out-of-town engagement at Hartford Stage and the Old Globe in San Diego. It ran 905 performances and won four Tony Awards in 2014 — Best Musical, Best Book, Best Director, and Best Costume Design — over a season that also produced Beautiful, After Midnight, and the long-shot success of Hedwig.
Production facts
Music & lyrics
Steven Lutvak
Book & lyrics
Robert L. Freedman
Source novel
Israel Rank (1907), Roy Horniman
Director
Darko Tresnjak
Originating theatre
Hartford Stage · Old Globe, 2012
Broadway opening
Walter Kerr Theatre · 17 Nov 2013
Broadway closing
17 Jan 2016
Performances
905 regular · 32 previews
Tony wins
4 (Best Musical · Best Book · Best Director · Best Costume)
D’Ysquith family
8 deaths · 1 actor
Original Broadway cast
The principals
- Monty Navarro Bryce Pinkham
- The D’Ysquith Family Jefferson Mays
- Sibella Hallward Lisa O’Hare
- Phoebe D’Ysquith Lauren Worsham
- Miss Shingle Jane Carr
Mays’ eight roles across the D’Ysquith family — Lord Adalbert, Lord Asquith, Henry, Lady Hyacinth, Major Lord Bartholomew, Reverend Lord Ezekial, Lady Salome, and Chauncey — won him the 2014 Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination. The role has since been played by, among others, John O’Hurley, Adam Heller, and the original UK tour’s Sebastien Torkia.
The source novel
Israel Rank, 1907
Roy Horniman’s novel — its full title Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal — is one of those Edwardian curiosities that almost no one read at the time and that turned out to be unreasonably influential. The book is a first-person confession by a young man of Sephardic-Jewish descent who methodically eliminates his way to a peerage. The 1949 Ealing film Kind Hearts and Coronets took the plot and the family-of-victims gimmick (one actor — Alec Guinness — played all eight) but removed the Jewish identity of the protagonist, a change that Freedman and Lutvak inherited.
The novel entered the U.S. public domain in 1979 and the UK public domain in 2001, which is the window in which a workshop musical can quietly be developed without an option fee. Freedman has said the team came to it via a Wikipedia rabbit hole, the way a great many of the small musicals of the last fifteen years arrived at their sources.
Read more
In the magazine
We cover Broadway news, casting, reviews, and the off-Broadway pipeline. Browse the latest issue or follow the work of public-domain adapters in our History section — Gentleman’s Guide is one of ten musicals built on out-of-copyright sources in the last fifteen years.
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