When her husband is assassinated on their wedding day, Isabella is expected to be a part of the property that passes on to the next in line of the drug gang her husband controlled. Instead, she fights to lead the gang herself.

Isabella Rico is the gritty, personal, urban cousin of the opulent, Brechtian Moulin Rouge. The 15-minute movie musical is about a woman struggling for independence and the isolation that power brings. The score is completely original.

Isabella Rico is my experiment in approaching dramatic material in as naturalistic a musical style as possible.

The hardest part of making a musical work, on stage or screen, is justifying the transition from spoken dialog to singing. Movie Musicals need a larger-than-life sensibility and/or a fantastical, stylized world to distance the audience and enable the suspension of disbelief.

While the story of Isabella Rico is still larger-than-life and the violence stylized, the environment is real and the acting naturalistic. Isabella Rico eases the viewer into the musical aspect, beginning with a wedding reception, where people would naturally be dancing, and possibly even singing along to the music. A naturalistic hymn at a funeral is co-opted by rival gang members into a song attacking Isabella in the same manner children might transform nursery ryhmes to make fun of each other on the playground. It is not until the music goes entirely into Isabella's head, reflecting her internal struggle, that the visual style breaks out into non-linear fragmentation, a psychological landscape of her mind.