Time period: late 1920’s.
Score: Original songs with "electroswing" arrangements.
One act structure.
Scenic needs: Immersive theatre; scenes primarily occur in a main space with tables and chairs and a small performance stage. There are scrim-throughs to a chorines’ dressing room, the dancing man’s dressing room, and the leading lady’s dressing room. Three adjacent spaces (each to hold 1/3 of the audience, standing) are used during the police raid sequence: they are a police wagon, a hidden liquor storeroom, and an alleyway.


Topeka Mcshane, Proprietress of the Hush Club, a notorious speakeasy, welcomes all comers and lays out the house rules, reminding her patrons that “We Make the Night.” After newest chorine Evie flubs her bit in the opening number, Topeka dresses her down and asks rookie waiter Brady to get her caught up or else she’s out. Song and dance man Deuce also helps Evie by bringing her into his signature number and letting her shine. Buoyed by the rescue and by the camaraderie among the girls, Evie thinks she may have found a place to call home. 

During a Charleston number, chorine Hattie collapses and Deuce brings on funny man Mortimer to cover. Topeka spots international star Wysandria Cole Davis in the audience and invites her famous friend to sing. Wysandria obliges with a bluesy tune skewering America’s Jim Crow oppressiveness and celebrating the freedom she enjoys on the Continent. Then, as chorine Mae dances a dangerous apache with Bootleg Jake, Evie and Brady spark near the bar.

A series of backstage scenes further illuminate relationships: the doorman is obsessed with Mae, Hattie’s collapse was not because of a drug habit, but because she’s pregnant, and we learn Evie is Topeka’s niece brought in from Kansas (and a bad family situation), but she wants no one other than Deuce and Dora to know. 



Deuce puts the moves on Evie and then insists she take Hattie’s place in a new, flashy "double duet" number. But during the song, Evie switches partners to finish with Brady, infuriating Deuce. Deuce confronts Evie in the chorines’ dressing room, while, simultaneously, Topeka and Wysandria camp it up with a comic duet about no-good men. Evie indicates she’s no stranger to men wanting to use her. After sex, Deuce boasts that he is soon to take over the club. Topeka overhears Deuce’s scheme and demands that he leave. He brandishes a gun, a lamp is knocked over, and the dressing room goes dark. We hear a scuffle. A scream. A gun shot... then, on stage, a pin spot discovers a tap shoe. Lights rise to full and Deuce wows the crowd with sensational hoofing. When he stands from his bow, blood seeps through his shirt. The dance of a dead man? 



The other performers, including a shell-shocked Evie, start a sexy jazz number that gets interrupted by the police banging on the door. It’s a raid! Everyone scatters...half of the
audience is led to a secret liquor storage room. Others are whisked into the back alley where other policemen are waiting. The rest try to escape with Evie, Hattie, Wysandria, and Dora, but the police enter and shuffle them into a police wagon. Topeka is nowhere to be seen.


The police are suddenly called away (Capone has been spotted nearby!). Brady, now revealed to be an undercover cop, pulls Evie out of the wagon, but she tells him off, betrayed again by yet another man. In the locked wagon and in the storage room, cast and patrons must figure out how to free themselves “escape room’ style. The people in the alley are interrogated until the police are called for backup elsewhere (Capone!).



In Topeka's dressing room, she breaks the news that she only has a few months to live and says she'll take the rap for Deuce's murder. Despite Evie's objections, Topeka gives her "niece" control of the club. In a flashback between Topeka and Dora, we learn that Evie isn’t Topeka’s niece... she’s her daughter.



All are back in the main space and Topeka is led out in handcuffs, having confessed to killing Deuce, and the police haul her away. Everyone now looks to Evie who holds the club’s ownership papers, uncertain about a young farm girl’s ability to take on the responsibilities of running an illegal operation in the Big, Bad Apple. Though she cares for her new “family,” she has learned the world they dwell in is not the world she wants for herself. Wysandria offers to buy the club from Evie, finally giving her the chance to make it big in the Big Apple. Evie says yes to the deal, ensuring a solid future for her new friends, and the cast reprises “We Make the Night.” On the button, there is a startling black out. When lights rise again, the entire cast is nowhere to be seen.