An Audience with the Mafia is a real curiosity. It is so bewilderingly awful it is hard to know where to start. From the off, there has been a strange blanket of secrecy surrounding the show. Of the two-strong cast, only the supporting bit-part player Nicole Faraday receives a credit, yet the majority of the two-hour running time is in effect a monologue performed by someone credited only as "The Mercy Man", a character apparently based on a British-born assassin employed by the Mafia. There is also no writing credit. In short, the whole thing looks suspiciously like a misconceived and very expensive vanity project, executed (no pun intended) by our mysterious narrator.
Mercy Man seems to have single-handedly invented a new and wholly unnecessary genre of theatre: the Discovery Channel - Live! An Audience with the Mafia is essentially nothing more than a string of stories about organised crime in 20th-century America. Sadly, the writing is dreadful. It cobbles together strings of names and dates, never passing up the opportunity to relate a redundant fact, slowing the crawling pace to a near standstill. The language is leaden, wrought almost entirely from cliché and, in places, comically inept: at least five separate victims are "shot to death" at various points.
