Lizzie Borden, but make it a jukebox musical

The crime
The unsolved murders of Andrew and Abby Borden by repeated blows to the head in their Fall River, Massachusetts home on August 4th, 1892. 

The story
It’s Lizzie Borden as you have never seen her! In folk meta jukebox musical form! No, this isn’t Lizzie the Musical from 2009, or the Fall River Legend ballet first performed in 1948, and no it doesn’t feature “Lizzie Borden,” the 1962 hit folk song recorded by the Chad Mitchell Trio (sample lyric: “No, you can’t chop your poppa up in Massachusetts/ Massachusetts is a far cry from New York”).

This is also not the Lizzie that sprang from the mind of Ryan Murphy. This Lizzie Borden is from the UK-based Out of the Forest Theatre Company, and while it’s unlikely to pull the same audience as Murphy’s latest offering, it went down a storm in a small theatre in London. First performed in 2018  and since shown across the UK, Canada, and the US, Southwark Playhouse’s most recent production began its 2026 run right after the dog days of summer’s canonical end on August the 12th. 

Why does this case attract musical interpretations? Is it the blood, the summer’s heat, the generational conflict, or that there’s few things quite as punk rock as a woman in a corset with an axe? It probably stems back to the creation of the Forty Whacks rhyming couplet which forever thrust Lizzie into the public domain, fixed in verse as the vengeful—but efficient—daughter.

Bury the Hatchet features three performers, guitar, period costume, some devilishly good fiddle-playing, goose feathers, and a selection of songs from traditional murder ballads to 60s soul to Kings of Leon. They get to the sing-song rhyme quickly, only to debunk it (“It wasn’t an axe it was a hatchet!”), which reflects the shape of the play, a musical mirror-world which reflects the story only to remix it. There’s a lot of talk of myths, and how gossip becomes news which becomes legend which becomes songs. As the tagline has it, “every murder ballad needs a body.” 

“We can’t get past the Borden murders without blood” wrote Bill James, and from the red dress that writer and star Sasha Wilson wears, to the blood-tinted lighting that occasionally drenches the stage, Bury the Hatchet doesn’t shy away from the stuff in everything but liquid form. For the benefit of the more queasy audience members, the performers stop short of reenacting the murders. There is, however, a hatchet floating above them the entire time, just in case you were in danger of missing the joke. 

All three performers—alongside Wilson there’s Lawrence Boothman and David Leopold—are accomplished musicians, weaving between song, courtroom drama, and versions of themselves bickering over whether they can pull off the right accent. Wilson is the only American and has to Britsplain certain elements of the case to them, like clearing up where Massachusetts is (“Think Boston!” “OK, that’s fine, I have seen every Boston crime drama ever made—I’ll park the car in Harvard yard.”)

While Wilson emphasises to the audience the depth of her research, including primary sources, where the facts peter out, the fun stuff gets filled in. Myth means folk songs and jokes about how many downers Lizzie Borden was strung out on. There’s a camp streak throughout—Leopold and Boothman are eager to jump into quick drag playing Abby Borden as a simpering stepmother, or Lizzie’s frenemy Alice Russell as a disloyal flake. The blood is always there, with red lighting that descends like a bad mood between vignettes, but this play is less interested in gore than it is in mystery and the blank slate that it provides for the imagination. 

If it sounds too insular, all this meta-awareness of a murder becoming a Grimm’s fairytale and a courtroom becoming a theatre, the deftness of the performers and the rollicking energy they bring lift it up from the swamp of overthinking. Of all the questions posed, like whether Lizzie was queer, suffering from PMS, a chronic thief, in an incestuous affair with her uncle, or an actual witch, the play never bothers to ask us why we’re interested in all this sordidness.

Instead it places various frames around the story, from the pharmacological (just how altered was Lizzie when she was questioned?) to the feminist, judicial, socio-political, and even art historical (was it all those Catholic paintings of torture that she saw in Europe which gave her the idea?). The big question—did she do it or not?—is literally danced around. It’s a better story if she did, after all. 

Bury the Hatchet

Recommendation: Watch

The case in favor:

• The expert performances keep it from veering into too much and level out at just right.