REWRITES: Jeezus! at Lowry

Catholic guilt collides with unrepentant queerness in the acclaimed musical from award-winning migrant-led company, Alpaqa.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” begin the press materials of Jeezus, a show you’d either describe as ‘cheeky’ or a display of blasphemy fit to damn its creators for all eternity, depending on your mood. It’s set in 1990s Peru, under the brutal dictatorship of President Alberto Fujimori. Altar boy Jesús, the son of a general in Fujimori’s regime, is preparing for his first communion when he starts to feel something… unholy towards the ripped guy on the cross. What follows is a gleefully sinful musical comedy mixing live tunes, dark humour, and Latin heat.

Jeezus exorcises the childhood trauma of writer and performer Sergio Antonio Maggiolo, who found himself wracked with shame growing up queer in conservative Catholic Latin America. “For centuries”, he says, “’the word of God’has been used to repress and punish our instincts”. At the same time, Maggiolo thinks faith can be a form of love. That tension is where Jeezus lives. The show wrestles with religion, rather than denouncing or mocking it, while also speaking to right-wing authoritarianism’s co-option of religious dogma to police ‘acceptable’ love, identities and bodies.

Directed and co-created by Laura Killeen, Maggiolo plays Jesús with wide-eyed earnestness while his fiancé and co-songwriter Guido García Lueches plays nearly everyone else: a doting mother, a hard-line general of a father and, eventually, the object of Jesús’devotion. The score moves between Lloyd Webber-style balladry and Peruvian folk, while the wider production is described as the unlikely lovechild of Bo Burnham, Bad Bunny, and Bertolt Brecht. Think radical camp shot like an arrow at systemic oppression.

Having won the 2025 Untapped Award, landed a spot in The Stage’s Fringe Five and taken the Edinburgh Fringe by storm, the show now returns for its second coming. Apparently, it’s hotter, sweatier, and even more unhinged than before, as well as “bulging with new songs”. It arrives at Lowry as part of the theatre’s Rewrites programme, which means the evening will also feature a selection of ‘curtain raisers’– little snippets of new or WIP musicals. Jeezus was once a ‘curtain raiser’ itself, and just look at it now.