From 'Chicago' to 'Dead Outlaw': All the Broadway Shows Inspired by Real Crimes

True crime has long been a rich source of adaptation for books, films and television series—whether it’s ripped-from-the-headlines episodes of police procedurals or movies that shed new light on a case we only thought we knew. 

The same can be said for the stage. Crimes from the tragic to the infamous, scandalous and strange have served as source material for actors to mine and audiences to fill seats. In 2025 alone, New York’s Broadway stages have seen a bank robber’s corpse traverse the country (Dead Outlaw), a fight with deadly consequences (Punch) and a sensationalized turn-of-the-century murder trial (Ragtime), while next year brings two major TV stars and a famous heist to the stage (Dog Day Afternoon).

Read on for a murder’s row of 10 plays and musicals that have run on Broadway over the years that are inspired by real-life crimes.

There’s perhaps no better example of a musical turning its focus to the public’s fascination with crime than Chicago. The musical, with music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a book by Ebb and Bob Fosse, is based on a 1926 play of the same name by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who, as a Chicago Tribune reporter was assigned to cover the trials of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner. Annan and Gaerter were accused and later acquitted of murder and served as the inspirations for the deadly duo of Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart. In Chicago, Velma is a vaudeville singer who kills her husband and sister after catching them in an affair (similar to Gaertner, a cabaret performer who allegedly shot and killed her lover), while Roxie, like Annan, is a housewife who shoots and kills her lover. (Other “Merry Murderesses” also make up the show’s “Cell Block Tango” number, all women who killed men who they claim wronged them.) The musical, like Watkins’ play, is a satirical look at the justice system and how the media and public sentiment can catapult a criminal into a celebrity. Its long-running Broadway revival has featured many famous faces over the years, including Pamela Anderson, Wayne Brady, Brandy, Christie Brinkley, Melanie Griffith, Jinkx Monsoon, Mel B and more.

With music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown (who also worked on Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, another musical based on a real-life crime that’s aiming for Broadway) and a book by Alfred Uhry, Parade dramatizes the true story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man in 1913 Atlanta who was accused of murdering a 13-year-old girl who worked at a factory he managed. The musical depicts the forces that shaped his subsequent trial and conviction—antisemitism, pressures on officials to close the case, unreliable witness testimony and tabloid sensationalism among them. It also explores how, after the Georgia governor commuted Frank’s sentence from hanging to life in prison after a review of the case, a masked mob kidnapped and lynched him in 1915. (The real Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986.) A 2023 revival of Parade, starring Ben Platt as Leo and Michaela Diamond as his wife, Lucille, won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Direction of a Musical for Michael Arden.

First arriving on Broadway in 1998 and now being performed again in a 2025 revival, Ragtime (based on the 1975 novel of the same name by E. L. Doctorow) isn’t a true story but incorporates real-life historical figures and events into its narrative. The musical, featuring music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and a book by Terrence McNally, highlights the seismic changes America was facing through the eyes of three groups in turn-of-the-century New York: Black Americans, Jewish immigrants and the white upper class. Some of the real-life people who intersect with the show’s fictional characters include Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Booker T. Washington, Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit, who was tied to one of the so-called “crimes of the century.” Ragtime dramatizes the fanfare over Nesbit, a vaudeville performer whose lover, the renowned architect Stanford White, was killed by her millionaire husband, Harry Thaw, and his subsequent murder trial. 

Stephen Sondheim’s musical sets its aim on the real-life figures who tried, successfully or not, to kill a U.S. president. Using an otherworldly carnival as its framing device, the musical explores what drives someone to commit this type of political violence and what their motivations say about America itself. Characters in the musical, which has music from Sondheim and a book by John Weidman based on a concept by Charles Gilbert Jr., include John Wilkes Booth, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Charles J. Guiteau, John Hinckley Jr. and—spoiler alert—a narrator who ultimately transforms into Lee Harvey Oswald. While Assassins was first produced Off Broadway in 1990, its Broadway debut didn’t come until 2004, with a production that won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical and had a cast including Becky Ann Baker, Mario Cantone, Michael Cerveris, Neil Patrick Harris and Denis O’Hare.

Decades after their work on Chicago and Cabaret, Kander and Ebb penned the music and lyrics for this musical inspired by this infamous case of the same name. The Scottsboro Boys, which also features a book from David Thompson, dramatizes the true story of nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931 Alabama, and their subsequent arrest, conviction and incarcerations that spanned on during subsequent retrials and reconvictions that became a glaring example of injustice in the U.S. legal system. (The Supreme Court later overturned the convictions, ruling the young men didn’t have effective counsel.) The Tony-nominated musical arrived on Broadway in 2010, with a cast that included Joshua Henry and Colman Domingo. Its story is framed as a minstrel show, a choice director Susan Stroman said was inspired by ways journalists at the time referred to the trials, adding, “This framework allowed the actors to take charge of the storytelling, and ultimately reject the form at the end.”

A dynamic duo who need no introduction, outlaws and lovers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow have been immortalized over and over in pop culture history. This stage retelling of their story, with music by Frank Wildhorn, lyrics by Don Black and a book by Ivan Menchell, opens with the pair dead in a car, and then flashes back to tell the story of how they got there. Bonnie & Clyde shows the pair connecting as young dreamers—Bonnie hopes for movie stardom, while Clyde wants to be a criminal in the vein of Al Capone—and then continues as they grow up and embark together on a spree of robbing stores and banks, achieving folk hero status in the process. The musical arrived on Broadway in 2011 with Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan in the leading roles, and went on to earn Tony nominations for Osnes and its original score.

The story of Dana H. is chilling, not only for its subject matter, but in the inventive way the story is told. Playwright Lucas Hnath based the play on the real-life experiences of his mother, Dana Higginbotham, a Florida hospice chaplain who was kidnapped and held hostage for five months by a psychotic former patient. (Hnath was a college student when the abduction took place.) The audience hears Higginbotham tell the story in her own words—audio compiled from interviews she sat for some two decades after the kidnapping took place—while an actress (Deirdre O'Connell in the 2021 Broadway staging, for which she won a Tony Award) lip-syncs the dialogue word for word. Dana H. delves into those harrowing few months, and how Higginbotham processed them in the aftermath. “What she cares about a great deal,” Hnath told The New York Times of his mother, “is how can she help those people who have undergone extraordinary trauma, how can she help them heal? So I think of myself less as telling her story than as being complicit in that mission.”

It sounds almost too wild to be true: a bumbling outlaw whose corpse becomes a sideshow attraction going on decades after his death. But that’s the story of Dead Outlaw, and it’s a true one. The musical, which was nominated for seven Tony Awards during its 2025 Broadway run, centers on Elmer McCurdy (Andrew Durand in the original cast), an outlaw killed in a shootout with police in 1911 Oklahoma after a botched train robbery. That’s where McCurdy’s life ended, but his story only gets weirder from there. When no family comes to claim his body, McCurdy’s embalmed corpse becomes a circus attraction, part of a traveling sideshow, appears in movies and winds up painted red and hanging in a Los Angeles-area amusement park. With music and lyrics by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a book by Itamar Moses, Dead Outlaw may be the liveliest musical you ever see about a dead guy.

One punch is all it took to change two families' lives forever. The British play Punch, which ran on Broadway in 2025 after being performed in London, was written by James Graham and adapted from Jacob Dunne’s memoir Right from Wrong: My Story of Grief and Redemption. The book, and play, recount how a 19-year-old Dunne (portrayed in the show by Will Harrison) threw a single, unprovoked punch at 28-year-old James Hodgkinson that knocked him to the ground and killed him nine days later. Punch examines not just the aftermath of Dunne’s arrest and prison sentence, but also Hodgkinson’s parents (played by Victoria Clark and Sam Robards) grieving the death of their son—and the process of restorative justice that led them to eventually sit down with Dunne and forge an unlikely relationship with him. “I find it so overwhelmingly moving that two parents who lost their son in a moment of violence could possibly reach out to the person who did that to them and try to pursue a different path to deal with their grief,” playwright Graham told New York Theatre Guide.

Emmy-winning TV stars Jon Bernthal (The Walking Dead) and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) are getting ready to steal your attention on a Broadway stage this spring. The pair are starring in an adaptation of the Oscar-winning 1975 Sidney Lumet film Dog Day Afternoon, which is itself inspired by a famous real-life heist. The story, adapted for the stage by Stephen Adly Guirgis, centers on a group of hapless criminals in 1972 New York City whose plan to hold up a bank quickly goes wrong, turning into a hostage situation and standoff with authorities. One of the robbers—played in the film by Al Pacino and in the play by Bernthal, was motivated to commit the crime in order to get money for his partner’s gender-affirming surgery. Previews begin March 10 at the August Wilson Theater, ahead of the play’s official opening night on March 30.