Jeffrey W. Carver (JD '76) in new musical "Rope" (San Diego)

March 29, 2016 -- Pepperdine law alumnus Jeffrey W. Carver (JD '76) is appearing in an award-winning new musical "Rope," about an Old West hangman, at the Tenth Avenue Theater in San Diego, now through April 3rd. Carver has his own practice, The Law Offices of J.W. Carver and Associates, which specializes in military law and criminal defense.

From the San Diego Union Tribune:

The frontier justice of the Old West came with punishment that was swift and, for some poor souls, irreversible.

But who to dole it out? After all, the condemned (to put it perfectly bluntly) ain't gonna hang themselves.

Enter William Maledon — official executioner, connoisseur of fine nooses and central figure of composer-writer Mark Sickman's folksy, modest new musical "Rope."

Maledon (played with plenty of understated charm by the New York-based actor Dennis Holland) becomes the conflicted hero of the piece, a kind of high-plains Hamlet.

His wife Mildred (the accomplished San Diego stage pro Natalie Nuccci), by contrast, is Lady Macbeth all the way — a manipulative social striver who revels in tin-pot celebrity and lets ambition drag her into the moral brambles like a runaway mustang.

Sickman, a La Jollan and longtime adman turned playwright, is self-producing the musical, which had a festival run in New York last year.