Infamous skip-rope rhyme subject Lizzie Borden was, in 1893, acquitted of all charges in the case of her father and stepmother’s axe murders. Despite not being found guilty, her story has proven to be fruitful true crime fodder, which is probably why in 2009, Steven Cheslik-deMeyer, Tim Maner, and Alan Steven Hewitt penned Lizzie: The Musical, bringing the sensational story to the stage in song. This month, Doctuh Mistuh Productions resurrects Lizzie’s spirit once more at Austin Playhouse from July 11-20.
DMP also got its start in 2009, when artistic and stage director Michael McKelvey says he noticed a lack of smaller genre stage productions in Austin. “Our mission became [that] we should do shows that we think no one else in Austin will ever do,” he explains. After success with mounting off-Broadway horror adaptation Evil Dead: The Musical, McKelvey and the DMP team made efforts to seek out other underseen stageplays with Lizzie high on the list. “It took me 10 years to get close to the rights on the show,” McKelvey says. “In the meantime, I kept saying, ‘This is this great show with a lot of international buzz. Someone in Austin will do it.’ And no one did.”
Having given Lizzie its regional premiere back in 2023, McKelvey is excited to return to the material this year with Stella Frye-Ginsberg back in the lead role. The actor recalls being fairly unfamiliar with the Borden story prior to auditioning but became totally engrossed after researching the case. “I didn’t get the extent of all of the different factors that played in specifically to her trial,” she said, citing in particular the incredible sexism of the 1800s. “That was the part of the trial I dove the deepest into because I thought [it] was so fascinating,” Frye-Ginsberg explains, “the way that she was able to basically get away with this crime because men thought that this, like, 30-year-old woman was just incapable of being able to be strong enough to even hold an axe to commit the murders.”
Another element attracting the actor to Lizzie was it being a rock musical, as she’s a rock & roll fan ever since her father introduced baby Frye-Ginsberg to Seventies genre staples like Led Zeppelin. Yet coming into the 2023 production fresh from high school*, “I had never done a role in which I was singing this much,” Frye-Ginsberg explains, as her range didn’t match the high soprano belts found in most contemporary musicals. Through the process of finding her voice as Lizzie, she also discovered a place for her specific rock-centric vocals. “When I found this musical,” Frye-Ginsberg says, “I was like ‘I can find myself in this, and there’s pieces of myself in this genre of theatre.’”
But why do we return to the Borden story, time and time again? Frye-Ginsberg attributes public interest to the rapidly disappearing phenomenon of the unknown. “The whole thing is a question mark,” she says, “and it’s just so fascinating, because if this had happened now with the technology and the advancements that we have in this day and age, like this would have gone completely differently.” Whatever the cause of the excitement, director McKelvey’s happy to have a reason to bring Lizzie back to Austin. “We only had a three-week run the first time we did it,” he says, “and we heard all sorts of people tell us, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I missed it.’ … So we’re also remounting the show for all those people who didn’t get a chance to enjoy it the first time.”
Lizzie: The Musical
Friday 11 – Sunday 20, Austin Playhouse
*This story has been updated to reflect that Stella Frye-Ginsberg first took on the Lizzie role after high school rather than college. The Chronicle regrets this error.
This article appears in July 11 • 2025.
