About the Play:

King of Thieves is a full-length musical with book and lyrics by George F. Walker and music by Dora Award-winner John Roby. Caught up in a life of crime, Mac is surprised when his equally crooked father-in-law summons him to play a key role in a plot to take down a group of corporate bankers who plan to crash the market and reap the financial rewards. Instead, they soon hatch schemes of their own. A nightclub cabaret in 1928 New York is the setting for this musical tale of deception, double-cross and sudden demise.

King of Thieves is set in New York City, 1928. Master-thief Mac must join an FBI sting operation against a cadre of corrupt bankers. Music, murder, and mayhem ensue – at the speakeasy where criminals scheme and on Wall Street where financiers conspire. Inspired by John Gay's 18th-century classic The Beggar's Opera, which was later immortalized in the great Brecht-Weill composition The Threepenny Opera, this trenchantly satirical play with songs exposes a world of corporate crime that's all too familiar today. Readers familiar with these works will delight in the inspired pairing of Mac and Polly, his disapproving father-in-law Peachum and his missus, Jenny Diver, and a host of others within the corrupt world of Wall Street bankers immediately before the 1929 market crash. Readers meeting these characters for the first time will find much to enjoy in George F. Walker's ready wit and keen sense of story. When the FBI blackmails Peachum into helping bring down a group of corrupt bankers, he partners with Mac, his son-in-law, to discover that the bankers are using their wealth to inflate the market, plotting to pull their assets just before the bubble bursts. They scheme to make new fortunes by providing loans after everyone else goes bankrupt. If all of this sounds distressingly familiar, it should. At its heart, King of Thieves, like both its predecessors, is an examination of criminal behaviour at all levels of society, and of the disturbing truth that everyone can fall prey to dishonesty and corruption. But the element of fun in George F. Walker's script makes us laugh and his sense of zaniness reflects the bafflement many of us feel when contemplating our own world: a place where men of dubious moral integrity still inhabit the corridors of power and are still not taken to task for their dishonourable – if not downright criminal – behaviour.

King of Thieves was first produced in 2009 at the Studio Theatre during Canada's prestigious Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario.

Cast: 4 female, 11 male

What people say:

"Everyone is double-crossing everyone else and the bodies are hitting the floor quicker than you can say ‘alienation effect." — The Star (Toronto)

"… slick … entertaining … I loved John Roby's razz-a-ma-tazzy Jazz Age score, peppy and tuneful." — Richard Ouzounian, The Star

"...a tangled web of treachery, deception, and cold-blooded murder, complete with a fair share of gunfire and stabbing. In other words, a little for the whole family." — TorontoStage.com

"A charming gangsta rhapsody...." — PressPlus1.com

About the Playwright:

George F. Walker is a prolific Canadian playwright with working-class roots in Toronto's hard-luck Cabbagetown, the city's now trendy East End. Instrumental to the 1970s alternative theatre movement in Canada, the self-taught playwright has written more than 30 plays and created screenplays for several award-winning Canadian television series. His plays have been presented across Canada and the United States and in more than 700 productions internationally. His work has been honoured with two Governor General's Awards, eight Chalmers Awards, and five Dora Awards. He is also the recipient of the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement and is a Member of the Order of Canada.