“Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo” opened Friday at PAC NYC, and Jennifer Nettles owns the project end to end. She not only stars as the title character, she also wrote the songs and the book, after discovering the other book writers she worked with were taking a “campy” approach that she did not want. The result, in this Off Broadway review, is a serial killer story that aims for feminist moral weight but too often plays like a one-person dirge.

That contrast is the entire headline worth of stakes: the show is built around Giulia Tofana, a real 17th Century figure tied to poisoning “a few hundred men” who abused wives, girlfriends, and even pet dogs. But the review argues the musical does not get the same artistic engine that makes Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “Sweeney Todd” hit so hard. Where “Sweeney Todd” turns Grand Guignol into genuine tragedy, “Giulia” keeps delivering high-minded sanctimony. Nettles’ performance is framed as sincere but overburdened, with the title character carrying the moral weight of multiple murders alone and never letting the production stumble into the deeper kind of consequence that makes tragedy sing.

There is also a structural difference that the reviewer keeps circling: “Sweeney Todd” is not merely a killer story, it is a partnership story. Wheeler gives Sweeney an accomplice in Mrs. Lovett, whose ditzy low humor sharpens the grizzly enterprise and prevents the material from going flat. In “Giulia,” the show supposedly lacks that counterweight. Instead, it loads Giulia with the job of being the moral narrator, including an explicit refusal when the Duchessa (Didi Romero) wants Giulia to off her husband “because he’s a bore,” with the musical’s rules landing as “Only wife abusers deserve to die.” The review points out the drama could have evolved if the Duchessa had lied about the husband’s actions and then later exposed Giulia’s misjudgment, but the show, as described, never makes that kind of mistake.

So what’s actually happening inside the story mechanics? The review says Giulia is a local abortionist helping pregnant women avoid giving birth to babies with “lousy fathers,” which the writer frames as part of the modern feminist reframing. Yet, when it comes to the show’s “BS-detector,” the reviewer suggests it is too infallible. The production, as portrayed here, only ever poisons the “right” bad men, which removes a key ingredient of tension: the possibility that moral certainty can be exploited. In other words, the villainy in the plot is clear, but the ethical friction that could make the audience squirm is often muted.

Even the villain roles, in this account, are treated as substitutions rather than accelerants. “Sweeney Todd” has real villains that do real moral damage, specifically Judge Turpin and his servant Beadle Bamford. In “Giulia,” the antagonists are the Governatore (Christopher M. Ramirez) and the Cardinale (Quentin Earl Darrington). The review flags a confusing early setup that identifies one as a politician and the other as a clergyman, then presents them as “therefore bad.” The Cardinale, despite lots of stage time, is described as mostly functioning to deny he’s syphilitic after Giulia’s diagnosis, with a song the reviewer calls a rip-off of Sondheim’s “Johanna (Mea Culpa).” His vengeance credo “The Wolf” arrives late in act two, and the critique is that it comes after several equally loud and pompous anthems.

Music and staging are where the story turns from plot logic to production leverage. The reviewer says there are “kernels of good songs” in Nettles’ score, but orchestrations by Cian McCarthy bring a “Les Miz”-overstatement to each tune, and the result is that catchy moments get swamped. Watching the show is compared to “the season’s grand finale of ‘American Idol’ where every singer is out to win,” which is a neat way of saying the production pushes for vocal spectacle more than it creates variety in emotional volume. The show does give younger character energy too, including Vitoria (Naomi Serrano), who has a convent-sequestered big moment with “When I Still Believed,” but the reviewer argues the pacing is not earned the way it is in “Sweeney Todd,” where quiet lead-ins create payoff for chorus numbers like “City of Fire.”

Now for the genuinely useful “there is good news” section, because this review does not pretend the entire production is flat. The physical production is described as “exquisitely restrained,” directed by Mary Zimmerman, with a scenic design by Daniel Ostling featuring three doors and a grand staircase lit by T. J. Gerckens. Those doors create suspense because the audience does not know what they will reveal: Mediterranean settings, shop windows, a convent. The reviewer’s conclusion on craft is also a business-adjacent one: “Less is always so much more.” That is a directional signal for anyone leading creative teams, because it suggests the production’s best moments come from control and focus, not from maximalist emotional volume.