Lizzie Borden

It must have been a foreigner, a lunatic, a beast! But it’s just us girls in the house of Borden.

The legend of Lizzie Borden performed as a touring road show by an all-girl-fronted hard rock band. That was the idea that fired our imaginations.

The all-American legend of Lizzie killing her parents and getting away with it — literally destroying the old Victorian patriarchy — and taking a radically 20th-Century path to fame parallels the great American rock-and-roll story of rebellion against your parents, the birth of a new g-g-generation, self-destruction and reinvention.

Telling the story with rock’s chosen weapon for rebellion, redemption and revolution — the “Axe” (as wielded so violently by Townsend and again later by Cobain) — was only natural.

We imagine the show as a rock concept album turned into epic rock theatrical — so our inspirations turn naturally to the bloody great rock spectacles of the 70s (Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, Kiss) and to generations of strong, hard-cutting women rockers (Grace Slick, Heart, Patti Smith, The Runaways, Joan Jett and Lita Ford, Wendy O. Williams) whose sound is pitch-perfect for the explosion from repression that Lizzie’s acts mirror for her turn of the century generation.

We were deeply inspired by the actual historical events. The book is almost entirely adapted from court transcripts. You hear the women speak in their own words. But when they sing ... that’s us giving voice to the other side of the Lizzie story, the rumors, the innuendo, the theories, the jump rope rhyme, the legend that she became.

We want it loud, sexy, bloody, angry, creepy, funny, rebellious, and thoroughly entertaining.

So, let us take you to an August, back in 1892, when all hell broke loose in the House of Borden.

-Steven, Tim, and Alan

HISTORY

In 1892 on a sweltering August day in a small New England town, “somebody” brutally murdered a well-to-do elderly man and his second wife with an axe. Lizzie Borden, their youngest daughter, was the primary suspect, arrested and tried. Without any witnesses to the hideous crime, she was acquitted, and the murders remain unsolved to this day. Though Lizzie was
ultimately declared innocent according to the law,
her infamy lives on.

Our show enters the Borden household to explore these notorious events through the eyes of Lizzie, her older sister Emma, Lizzie’s close friend Alice, and the housemaid Bridget. Why would Lizzie do it? Who else knew what happened? How could she get away with the violent murder of her parents in broad daylight? Through original songs performed by four fierce rockers accompanied by a live band on stage, this driving musical presents a tale of repression and brutal parricide — and reveals why Lizzie Borden may have taken up that axe.