Chicago, 1926: the best speakeasy on the South Side has a body in the cold room and a fed at the bar.
The Velvet Rope sits under a funeral parlor on the South Side of Chicago, and on a Saturday night it holds three hundred people, a twelve-piece band and more whiskey than the Coast Guard has seen all year. Tonight a rival gang's runner was found shot in the ice room, a Prohibition agent is drinking ginger ale at the end of the bar, and the cold war between two bootlegging outfits is about to turn hot. The club owner, the singer, the agent, the bootlegger and the bartender each have a reason to want the body gone before dawn, and none of them can afford to be seen moving it.
5 roles. You take one; your friends take the rest, and the narrator plays any left over. Anyone can bring a character of their own into a role instead.
The Irish club owner who built the best speakeasy on the South Side and is one bad night away from losing it to the people who funded it.
The Velvet Rope's headline singer, who came up from New Orleans and is about to sign with a record label if she survives the week.
A federal Prohibition agent working undercover at the bar, who is honest, broke, and the only person in Chicago nobody has managed to bribe.
The South Side outfit's best runner, charming and ambitious, whose rival was the dead man in the ice room.
The head bartender, a decorated veteran of the Harlem Hellfighters, who knows every secret poured across his bar and keeps most of them.