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Washington Post
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
When the creators of the Hunter S. Thompson musical finally visited his estate
As the creative force behind 'The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,' Joe Iconis had been dreaming up the gonzo journalist's living room for the better part of two decades when he ventured to Colorado this past April and stepped foot in his cabin. Still inhabited by Thompson's widow, Anita, the home was in many ways exactly as the idiosyncratic author left it when he took his own life there in February 2005 at age 67. Stacks of books Thompson intended to read were seemingly left untouched. Masks of Richard M. Nixon, Thompson's self-declared nemesis, were hanging on the walls. The family's peacocks still roamed the space. Taped to the fridge, a note in Thompson's handwriting read, 'Never call 911. Never. This means you. HST.' 'To walk into the actual room was like nothing I have ever, ever experienced,' Iconis recalls. 'It felt like I was walking into my own script.' After premiering at San Diego's La Jolla Playhouse in 2023, the bonkers biomusical is back for a production at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, that runs through July 13. Featuring music and lyrics by 'Be More Chill' composer Iconis and a book co-written by Iconis and Gregory S. Moss, the show was penned without the rights to any of Thompson's works (as its purposely cumbersome title indicates). But with that trip to Thompson's Owl Farm estate, and the blessing of Anita and others in nearby Aspen who knew the renegade writer, 'The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical' suddenly became spiritually — if not legally — authorized. 'It speaks volumes of Joe as a composer and a writer that he was forbidden from using any of Hunter's actual writings but he found Hunter's voice, and folks who knew him feel like it did,' says George Salazar, who plays attorney and activist Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta in the musical. 'That is also what Hunter's writing was all about. It read chaotic, but there was deep intention and passion and purpose behind all of it.' Commissioned in 2008 by La Jolla to pen a musical based on Thompson's life, Iconis spent years writing the show under the assumption that a financier would inevitably materialize with the money to secure the necessary rights. But around 2016, Iconis says, the Thompson estate made it clear that such clearance was out of the show's price range. That meant Iconis had to excise any excerpts from Thompson's writing and all references to events only documented in his books, including 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' and 'Hell's Angels.' What Iconis could do, however, was depict the widely reported details of Thompson's life and conduct his own research. 'It was really scary,' Iconis says. 'But the amazing thing was that it forced me to not be able to use his language as a crutch. It forced me to actually get to the heart of everything I was trying to say at every single moment and have the word choices be 100 percent intentional.' Thus Iconis embarked on a years-long quest to evoke Thompson from afar. But when Iconis and his cast traveled to Aspen to perform songs from the show at Wheeler Opera House, Anita extended an invitation for the musical's entire traveling party — more than a dozen actors and other collaborators — to visit Owl Farm. It was an invitation Iconis accepted with trepidation. Anita, he understood, was concerned that the show would depict her late husband as a drug-crazed caricature and lose sight of his transcendence on the page. Was it worth opening up this unabashedly unlicensed endeavor to such scrutiny? 'For the life of the development of the show, I had never spoken to anyone directly connected with Hunter,' Iconis says. 'I didn't want anyone saying to me, 'Hunter would never do that.' And then the bigger part of it, really, was I didn't want anyone who knew him or who was associated with him to tell me that they hated it.' A pair of videos filmed during the visit capture Anita's approval. The first one — filmed after a young girl staying at Owl Farm suggested that Iconis play Thompson's piano — shows the composer tapping the keys to the show's rousing finale, 'Kaboom,' while his cast sings along. In the second, an emotional Anita subsequently gifts Iconis a necklace adorned with Thompson's gonzo fist emblem. 'Thank you,' she says, 'for keeping Hunter's spirit alive in such a beautiful way.' And Anita was far from the only person who knew Thompson to lend her expertise. Salazar and Jason SweetTooth Williams, the actor who plays illustrator Ralph Steadman in the show, both picked the brain of DJ Watkins, an Aspen art dealer and documentarian well versed in Thompson's story. Grabbing drinks at J-Bar, Thompson's longtime watering hole of choice, the cast struck up conversations with other folks who relayed their Thompson tales. 'It made it so much more real,' Williams says. 'Suddenly we weren't playing at something. Now, we're getting a chance to become something that we've actually experienced.' When the concert arrived, Iconis still wondered how Anita would perceive numbers highlighting the less-flattering aspects of Thompson's chaotic life. But after the show, she gifted him a bouquet of six-feet-tall peacock feathers, which he still has in his home. In an email to The Washington Post, Anita pushed back against a song that depicts Thompson as an absentee father but expressed overarching admiration for the cast and creative team. 'I'm sure Hunter would love the fact that such talented artists performers have devoted a part of their life to celebrating his extraordinary legacy,' she wrote. 'I just love the cast of the musical for using their talent and energy to celebrate a beautiful unique important American writer, whose work is relevant and helps readers understand this crazy world we live in 2025.' Asked about the musical remaining 'unauthorized,' she added: 'It appears that being required to use [Iconis's] words is what makes the musical a success.' (The executor of Thompson's literary estate did not respond to requests for comment.) Iconis subsequently tweaked the script to include details from the visit. A line in which Thompson marvels at the beauty that surrounds Owl Farm — 'The mountains look like waves to me, just slow moving' — was uttered by Anita. After Anita cut up grapefruits for her guests, Iconis added a line in which Thompson's son mentions her doing just that. In a mixed review, Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar praised Iconis's 'propulsive and occasionally catchy' score but critiqued the show's cradle-to-grave ambition. Although Iconis, a 2019 Tony nominee for 'Be More Chill,' hopes the musical has a future beyond its Signature run — perhaps on Broadway — the Aspen experience already marked a culmination of sorts for his journey into Thompson's headspace. 'For the actual human beings who knew that guy to like what we're doing, and feel like it accurately represents him?' Iconis says. 'F--- everything else.' Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. Dates: Through July 13. Prices: $47-$112.
Washington Post
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
The Hunter S. Thompson musical is somehow both gonzo and square
I was milling around with some ambivalence at my 25th high school reunion, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when Hunter S. Thompson delivered a jump scare from beyond the grave. Days before I was scheduled to see a musical about him at Signature Theatre, a glossy paperback of the rebel newsman's pinnacle work 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' was discovered inside a time capsule packed by a handful of my classmates. The book sprang at me like a skeleton hand clutching a lit cigarette. I haven't figured out who put it there, but the typewriter-armed misfit clearly meant something to a restless teenager toiling in mid-'90s suburbia — and probably dreaming of drug-addled fame and abandon. The vitality of his legacy, 20 years after he died by suicide in 2005, is the animating question of 'The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,' which is as unwieldy yet stubbornly straightforward as the title suggests. Do people even know who he is anymore? A Gen Z actor (Giovanny Diaz de Leon) planted in the audience sizes him up and wagers a decent guess: James Taylor? Having to convince the uninitiated why they should care means starting the show on the back foot, a position it never really recovers from. Thompson is framed as a folk hero with hedonistic tendencies, righteously damning the man and championing people he calls outsiders and freaks. Among the more vaguely rebellious vibes are pointed throughlines that smartly speak to the present, mainly in drawing parallels between Presidents Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. But in wrangling counterculture into musical theater, the show reenacts the fate that befell its subject — morphing a hip renegade into a goofball cartoon. Making a case for his notoriety in his beloved first person is Hunter himself (Eric William Morris), clad in the signature green poker visor, red Hawaiian shirt and yellow-tinted shades. (The casually groovy costumes are by Toni-Leslie James.) In a familiar storytelling trope, our protagonist is aware of his limited time on Earth (measured in 'tick, tick, tick' refrains from the ensemble) and determined to prove that he burned fast and bright. For a narrator who invented the outlandish, freewheeling style known as gonzo journalism, it feels a bit square to start this memoir at birth. But composer Joe Iconis and book writer Gregory S. Moss attempt a cradle-to-grave account of Thompson's life and career in 2 hours and 40 minutes. For Thompson fans and those who've seen filmmaker Alex Gibney's very good documentary 'Gonzo' (2008), the plot will yield few surprises: his breakout embedding with the Hell's Angels, turn to covering presidential politics and eventual descent into caricature. True to Thompson's spirit, that road is riddled with sizable detours — such as his love of firearms and how he met his exceedingly patient wife (Tatiana Wechsler) — and traversed with madcap momentum. ('The way you tell a story is confounding,' a faux heckler tells him.) The highlights of director Christopher Ashley's production, which premiered in 2023 at La Jolla Playhouse, where he is artistic director, are in the visual flourishes that aim to capture the colorful gusto of Thompson's writing. Handheld horses clomp through his chronicle of the Kentucky Derby, and fuzzy bats with ruby eyes swoop overhead en route to Vegas. (Puppetry design is by Animal Cracker Conspiracy.) On the throw-everything-at-the-wall set (by Wilson Chin), wildly colorful and dynamic lighting (by Amanda Zieve) directs the eye with stunning precision. For all that, the production's ingenuity feels like elaborate costuming dressing up dogged convention. The book hews closely to an and-then-this-happened checklist of Thompson's career, rollicking tangents notwithstanding. Iconis's pastichy score, a 'Hair'-light mix of Broadway pop and melodic rock with touches of gospel, rap and emo, is propulsive and occasionally catchy, but no match for Thompson's originality. Nor Ralph Steadman's — a song about the British illustrator, whose macabre panache came to epitomize Thompson's style, rings anodyne next to the Steadman drawings plastered on the walls. As with his score for 'Be More Chill' (which reached Broadway in 2019), Iconis excels at vivid, one-off character songs. George Salazar, a standout of that show, gets a resounding anthem here as Mexican American activist Oscar Acosta, whom Thompson characterized as his Samoan attorney sidekick in 'Fear and Loathing,' a diminishment the musical attempts to correct. In a pair of breakthrough numbers, Ryan Vona proves exceptionally limber as George McGovern ('Oo, daddy, talk to me about poverty,' Thompson coos at his adored candidate) and tenderly affecting as the adult version of the writer's long-neglected son. Morris meets the challenge of gassing up Thompson as his career rides high and deflates, though registering emotion mostly falls to others while he's busy trying to change the world. Thompson is more apt to show feeling in an ardent ballad about the cause: We need a nation, he sings, of 'unemployment insurance/ and contraceptives/ literate children/ and empathetic leaders.' Fair enough. But a character needs more than gusto and a bleeding heart to feel human. Maybe it's no surprise that George Abud walks off with the show as a dry and mordant Nixon, Thompson's right-wing nemesis whose long tentacles still reach into the present. He prods and cajoles, jeers and intimidates, until he bellows the most bluntly inspired hook of the night: 'Richard Nixon gonna beat yo hippie a--.' Can you tell which party still struggles with messaging? Distilling an unbridled storyteller into one he didn't write himself is a daunting business: On opening night, Iconis said the show has been in development for some 20 years. But it speaks to the clarity of Thompson's convictions — and to how quickly and often history has repeated in recent decades — that the social struggles depicted here could be ripped from the headlines. This way, you can at least tap your feet and share a laugh. The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical, through July 13 at Signature Theatre in Arlington. 2 hours and 40 minutes with an intermission.
Washington Post
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Signature Theatre leads Helen Hayes Awards for best in D.C. theater
Signature Theatre led the Helen Hayes Awards with six wins — including four for the form-bending musical 'Private Jones' — during Monday night's ceremony at the Anthem honoring the best in D.C. theater. Inspired by the true story of a deaf Welsh sniper during World War I, 'Private Jones' told its tale with a blend of spoken English, American Sign Language, British Sign Language and Foley effects. The show earned the Charles MacArthur Award for outstanding new play or musical, plus prizes for supporting performer Erin Weaver, sound design and lighting design.
Washington Post
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Signature and Kennedy Center lead nominations for best in D.C. theater
'Private Jones,' a new musical about a deaf Welsh sniper in World War I, racked up 10 nominations for the Helen Hayes Awards, helping Signature Theatre edge the Kennedy Center for the top tally in advance of May's annual celebration of the best in D.C. theater. Signature's 25 nods also included seven for its boisterous revival of 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.' Among the Kennedy Center's 24 nominations were seven for its Broadway Center Stage production of the gleefully irreverent 'The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,' plus six apiece for 'Bye Bye Birdie' and 'Nine.'
