The outrageous life of bootlegger George Remus will be recounted onstage in August at The Carnegie in Covington. The Carnegie’s theater director Maggie Perrino is staging George Remus: A New Musical, one of three shows presented in a summer repertory season that includes Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods and Jonathan Larson’s Rent.
Perrino tells CityBeat that she met composing team Mark Friedman and Janet Yates Vogt when she produced the November 2017 production of their musical Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical at The Carnegie.
“It was a really merry crew on that show,” Perrino says. “They mentioned they were working with local playwright Joe McDonough on a show about George Remus.” She adds that she offered to give it a workshop at The Carnegie, and they agreed.
Perrino’s plan was to see how it worked with a reading in 2020; of course, the worldwide pandemic made that impossible. But Perrino’s inventive management of theater offerings during 2021 afforded another possibility.
“We did a mini-season of short performances at the new Covington Plaza on the Ohio River shore,” Perrino says. “Mark, Janet and Joe liked the idea of a staged reading, and the location by the Suspension Bridge made sense, since Remus’s bootlegging career was based in Covington and Cincinnati, both visible from the plaza.”
With a dozen performers, Vogt on piano with a drummer, and a bit of choreography, the reading happened twice last August.
“We had surprisingly good crowds — 450 tickets were sold for each night. People seemed interested in Remus’s story, and we were able to see more of what worked and what needed more work,” she says.
Their refinements continued for another year — the show has had “some 20-odd drafts,” according to Perrino, and now it’s ready for a full-fledged performance this summer.
Perrino didn’t know much about Remus before she began work on the show. She says she learned that he died in 1952 at age 74 in a modest home just a few blocks from The Carnegie. That was a significant comedown from his heyday in the 1920s when his mega-mansion “The Marble Palace,” located at 8th and Hermosa in Price Hill, was the scene for legendary parties, in part due to its $100,000 indoor swimming pool.
Remus showered his prestigious guests with gifts, including diamond stickpins and brand-new cars, according to the Price Hill Historical Society. Although Remus was not a drinker, his expansive Prohibition-era bootlegging empire afforded him a lavish lifestyle.
According to various biographies and accounts, his life was full of ups and downs, coming to the United States from Germany as a child in 1882 and settling in Chicago. Remus earned a pharmacy degree in 1897 but became a criminal defense attorney by 1902, making his name by defending a man in a sensational murder case. By 1920 Remus earned $500,000 annually with high-rolling clients.
When Prohibition was imposed in 1920, Remus’ legal knowledge paved the way to an illicit career producing and distributing alcohol under the guise of medicinal purposes. He moved to Cincinnati to be closer to whiskey manufacturers and built up a business with more than 3,000 employees. Remus became a multi-millionaire with a reputation as “The King of the Bootleggers, per a post from online project Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present.
Remus’ notorious career eventually landed him in prison. While he was incarcerated, his wife Imogene had an affair with an undercover prohibition agent, and they pillaged his fortune. Following Remus’s release, Imogene reportedly was on her way to the courthouse to divorce him when he gunned her down in Eden Park near its Victorian gazebo. Remus was acquitted of murder under a temporary insanity defense, according to a post on the Cincinnati Public Library’s website.
Remus’ history covers a lot of ground. But Perrino says Friedman and Vogt’s score for George Remus: A New Musical appropriately matches the era.
“It’s in the style of Golden Age theater with some lovely ballads and wistful romantic songs. It also has a splash of Jazz-Age, post-Ragtime numbers,” Perrino says.
She calls the show a “musical drama” about the astounding events of Remus’s life, adding “It’s a sensational story told as realistically as possible.”
The Carnegie’s content advisory for the show warns of “adult themes and language” and adds that it is “not suitable for young children.”
“Al Capone is in the show, and he certainly uses a bit of bad language,” Perrino says.
Mike Sherman, an actor and theater teacher at Walnut Hills High School, will play Remus, returning to the colorful role he filled in last summer’s workshop. He’s joined by Kate Mock Elliott, another returning performer from 2021, in the key role of Mabel Walker Willebrandt, an assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of Prohibition prosecution who doggedly pursued Remus’s illegal activity.
Kyle D. Taylor plays the tale’s narrator as F. Scott Fitzgerald. As The Carnegie states in the synopsis of the show on its website, it’s commonly believed that Remus was an inspiration for Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the 1925 novel about a mysterious millionaire with shady business connections. Perrino says the narrator helps the audience follow Remus’s timeline, up to his death in the 1950s.
Perrino’s summer season with shows in rotating repertory employs a single set that can be tailored for each production.
“The set can easily be Remus’s warehouse,” Perrino says. “We’re creating his mansion using great photography from the era, and we use many other projections to indicate time and place, for example as he moves from Chicago to Cincinnati in 1917 and to Covington in the 1950s.”
Her reconfiguration of the season has reduced costs. It’s been a useful experiment, she says.
“We’re learning as we go,” she says. “Subscriptions have been strong. You can still buy one in August and see all three shows.”
Perrino’s multi-show approach has offered diverse opportunities for local theater performers and designers training at University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, Northern Kentucky University and Xavier University. Lighting designers from CCM are providing sophisticated illumination for each production.
George Remus: A New Musical will run Aug. 13-28 at The Carnegie, 1028 Scott Blvd., Covington. Find more information at thecarnegie.com.
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