An Interview with Joe Iconis and Anika Chapin

Director of Artistic Development Anika Chapin interviews writer Joe Iconis on his process of creating The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical.

What drew you to Hunter S. Thompson as the subject of a musical?  

I had a passing familiarity with Hunter’s writing during high school as a result of Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas film. My grandparents took me to see the movie because it was rated R and the local mall movie theater wouldn’t let me in without a parent or guardian. (My grandparents did not love the film.) It wasn’t until I began reading more about Hunter’s personal life that I became interested in him as the subject for a theater piece. I loved how messy and strange and explosive and complicated his story was. The beats of Hunter’s life don’t fit neatly into a classic biographical dramatic structure. He was a charismatic, sexy, larger-than-life walking contradiction. His politics, his art, his relationship with reality- no part of his existence was without a certain level of complexity. When coupled with his drug-fueled speech patterns and his penchant for explosive devices and peacocks, it became clear that writing a musical about Hunter S. Thompson was a terrible idea. Which made me feel like I absolutely had to be the person to write it. I figured that even if the musical was a total failure, at least it wouldn’t be boring.

I think audiences are conditioned to see bio-musicals as memorials for the person at the center. My hope with The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical is that we’re not only celebrating Hunter but investigating and questioning him as well. It’s not as simple as: “Look at all the incredible things this wonderful man did!” It’s about honoring his contributions as an artist but also holding him accountable. Hunter as a character feels closer to anti-heroes like Daniel Plainview or Don Draper or Lydia Tár.

Why a musical specifically - is there anything about the form of the musical that feels especially suited to this subject?  

Many things. Hunter S. Thompson’s life and work feel heightened in every way. The way he lived, the way he wrote, every aspect of his life seemed to flirt with the surreal, the magical, the larger-than-life. Theater is an inherently non-literal artform so it felt like a musical would be the most honest way to organically depict the mayhem of Hunter’s story. I think if the events of our story were depicted in a film it would feel forced or way too “out-there” to connect with.

Hunter is a public figure, but the general population is most familiar with the manic cartoon persona of him frequently depicted in pop culture. A sort of drug-addled Johnny Knoxville from Jackass combined with a Mad Magazine illustration and, well, Johnny Depp. (Depp played Hunter several times and was a close friend of his for many years.) Singing is such a vulnerable enterprise, so I loved the idea of being able to use music to get inside of Hunter’s head and heart and guts. The songs allow Hunter to be sensitive and anxious in a way that might seemed phony otherwise. I knew early on that I didn’t want to cop out and have Hunter be the only character who didn’t sing in this musical. I totally understand that to some people the idea of Hunter S. Thompson singing a ballad in the middle of an honest-to-goodness musical is sacrilege. The potential cheese-factor is through the roof. But I was very purposeful about how I introduced the idea of this man singing into the script. When he begins the first song, it comes out of dialogue so, hopefully, the audience isn’t sure if he’s speaking or speaking-in-rhythm. And then he the speaking turns into-almost singing and the almost to full-on by the time we’re ten minutes in, he’s straight up belting out his feelings in the most classic musical theater fashion imaginable.  

Another reason why I feel this story needed to be a musical is because the score both amps up the momentum and clarifies the events of this very dense roller-coaster ride of a show. I’m a big believer in rhyme as I think rhyme helps an audience understand what the hell is going on. Even if what is going on is utter bedlam, rhymes provide the clarity for the audience to know that the bedlam is purposeful.  

During a recent trip to Colorado, you were able to visit Hunter S. Thompson's home and meet his widow, Anita. What did you learn from that trip? What surprised you? Did you change anything in the show based on that visit? 

The trip to Aspen and Woody Creek, was one of the more impactful experiences of my life. Members of the cast and I had the remarkable opportunity to visit Owl Farm, where Hunter lived for most of his adult life and where our show is set. Literally. Wilson Chin’s glorious set design is a theatricalized vision of the actual living room & kitchen of Owl Farm. Walking into the house, I was suddenly standing in this room I had been thinking about for eighteen years, left exactly as it was the day Hunter died, and I absolutely felt like I had stepped into my own script. The most out-of-body moment came when I saddled up to the piano and the gang and I sang “Kaboom,” the finale of the show that was inspired by Hunter’s memorial service. Immediately following, we walked the property and headed to the area where Hunter’s memorial service was held. The statue of the Gonzo fist from which his ashes were shot off in a blaze of fireworks was dismantled after the ceremony and Anita created what she refers to as "The Labyrinth." It's this gorgeous circle of rocks, the center of which is a little shrine to Hunter where people can leave (and take) offerings. Anita said that it's important that it's not to be confused with a maze. She said: "A maze has many paths and dead ends- it’s a puzzle to solve. A labyrinth has one entrance and one exit and it’s a continuous path to the center." 
The house is surrounded by such vast natural beauty, it's a little overwhelming. There is an expanse of mountains on every side; massive snow-capped mountains and red clay mountains. It's like a goofy little hobbit house parked in the middle of the Grand Canyon. That was something I never could’ve gotten from reading a book or watching a documentary. This story that features drugs and rock’n’roll and filthy politics was all taking place against this exquisitely pure landscape. The tension between those two vibes is that is something that was already in the piece a bit, but I’ve brought it out in a much more overt way since visiting Owl Farm.  

There was no way that experience could’ve left me unchanged. Everything that was theoretical for fifteen years now feels real. It’s easy to forget that people who did extraordinary things and changed the world were still just people. The house felt so warm and cozy and that warmth has translated into a deepening of all the characters, not just Hunter. I never intended to make a bio-musical that felt like everyone was a singing Wikipedia entry, but now I feel like it’s my mission to make this show the opposite of that.

You started writing this show many years ago, and yet it feels possibly even more relevant today. Did you anticipate that happening, or were you ever worried that its long development journey would cause it to lose relevance? 

When I first had the idea to write this musical, I never could’ve imagined I’d still be working on it eighteen years later. I won’t lie and say the process has been smooth or the path has been a straight line. We had multiple false starts, plenty of dead ends, and many times where it looked like the show was never going to happen at all. I took over book-writing duties during the 2020 pandemic and that’s when the show transformed into what it is now. So, even though this musical has been in my life for almost twenty years, there’s part of me that feels like I’ve only been working on it for five. Which is still a long-ass time.  

There have been several unintentional positives of our epically-long development process. The world has changed in ways that were previously unimaginable. Regime changes, global pandemics, reckonings of various natures, etc. For a long time, it felt like the show needed to directly speak to the moment insofar as politics or current events. It eventually became clear that there’d be no way to keep up with the rapidly evolving realties of America in the third Millenium. So instead of chasing the latest breaking news, I made it my mission to get to the heart of the issues that have plagued our nation for the last ten, twenty, thirty, one-hundred years. The more I pulled my focus out, the more I realized that no matter the specifics of the latest atrocity, we’d been there before. The result is that The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical aims to be both timely and timeless. The show is in conversation with the current political and cultural moment and my hope is that always will be. Do I think that the events of the musical feel particularly resonant at this very moment? Oh, hell yes. Many people think I’ve peppered Richard Nixon’s material with quotes from [our current President] and I absolutely have not. Weirdly, I’ve had to massage certain lines and lyrics, especially Nixon’s, to make them less on the nose. Like I said, we have always “been here before.” It gets better and worse and better and worse…

What's a major change to the show you've made over the course of the show's development? What will you never change in the show? 

I feel like I cracked the script during my pandemic re-write. Before then, I could never actually say exactly what I though the show was about. I don’t fully subscribe to the theater adage that you must describe your show in one sentence; that rule always felt more like marketing than dramaturgy to me. I think that a piece of theater can be about many things and mean different things to different people. But for …Hunter... I felt like the thing that would, ultimately, separate it from being your typical “High school book report”-style Bio-Musical would be figuring out, for myself at least, what the point of it all was. For me, that came from my experience with Be More Chill. I had the opportunity to meet so many people, young and otherwise, who were affected by that show. One young person I met at the Lyceum said to me: "I love the show because I deal with a lot of issues that the show dramatizes. I know that you must’ve gone through those same things because you knew enough about them to write about them. And since the show exists, it means that you got through them and came out on the other side." This particular kid really got me, but there were so many who told me how the musical helped them through rough times. It made me understand that the idea of art having the power to inspire wasn’t some magical, cheaply sentimental idea that existed on motivational posters hanging in Middle School chorus rooms. Art has the potential to change people’s lives in very tangible, very meaningful ways. Art has the power to keep people alive. Which is just another way of saying that art has the power to change the world. Which is what our show is about.  

The musical always ended with "Kaboom," but it wasn’t until I connected the character of THE KID to the young people I’ve been lucky enough to meet throughout my career that it all clicked. It feels kind of appropriate that a song I wrote in 2015 about an artist who died in 2005 didn’t fully make sense to me until 2020. Sometimes you can only understand the future by looking to the past. And vice versa.