Crouch End Festival Chorus, Roland Perrin's Blue Planet Orchestra, Roland Perrin, Rachel Sutton

In the world premiere of Lansky: The Mob’s Money Man, jazz composer and musician Roland Perrin dramatizes the life and crimes of enigmatic underworld boss Meyer Lansky. Known as ‘The Mob’s Accountant’, Lansky used his skill with numbers to raise himself out of the poverty of the Lower East Side of New York.

The savvy Polish-Jewish immigrant succeeded in reaching the upper echelons of the New York underworld, first making a fortune from bootlegging and then from an illegal gambling empire that spanned the world.

Perrin’s unique interpretation of Lansky’s life takes the form of a choral jazz drama, featuring nineteen episodes over two acts. The choir plays multiple roles including pogrom gangs, the Lower East Side’s teeming kaleidoscope of immigrants, the ticking of mathematical neural pathways, the vengeful and unstoppable wave of the revolutionary Cuban masses.

The solo female jazz vocalist personifies some of the women in the gangster’s life. Amongst these are Lansky’s grandmother, mother, first (eventually unhinged) wife, a stewardess, a streetwalker, his second (less refined) wife, a certain politician, and (perhaps) an angel...

Throughout, the narrator, played here in this first performance by actor, Allan Corduner, sits to one side in his comfortable armchair, watching and commenting wryly on the story’s twists and turns.