LA JOLLA, Calif. — The neon lights of Broadway may be some 2,800 miles away, but the road there often starts on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.
This is where you’ll find the La Jolla Playhouse — a Tony Award-winning regional theater that has an incredible track record of developing future award-winning titles.
Its history is storied and executive producer Eric Keen-Louie said that story begins more than 75 years ago.
“We actually started in 1947,” he explained, reaching for a framed black-and-white photo of Gregory Peck, one of the original founders with Mel Ferrer and Dorothy McGuire. “It started as a summer stock for Hollywood luminaries. So people like Charlie Chaplin performed there and Eve Arden.”
Back then, the company was located in a different space and it only lasted approximately twelve years before going dormant.
When it was eventually revived in 1982, it was with a renewed sense of purpose and a driving mission.
“It’s in our mission to be a safe harbor for unsafe and surprising work,” Kenn-Louie said. “So much of the work that we decide that we want to produce actually is in conversation with what’s happening in the country and the world right now.”
Whatever they are doing, it’s working.
Over the years La Jolla Playhouse has mounted 110 world premieres and has had almost three dozen shows go on to Broadway runs.
“Our last big hit here was a musical called ‘Come From Away,’” he said, pointing out that La Jolla’s artistic director Christopher Ashley won the Tony for Best Director for that show. “And so yeah, it’s an incredible incubator for new work. It feels like the safe cocoon.”
And a very active one.
This season two musicals that premiered at La Jolla will open on Broadway: “Harmony” and “The Outsiders.”
They join a long list of success stories that include “Jersey Boys,” “Diana,” “Memphis, Summer: the Donna Summer Musical,” and famously the “Who’s Tommy.”
For writer and composer Joe Iconis, La Jolla has always held legendary status.
“Oh my gosh, it’s a dream to be at La Jolla,” he gushed. “La Jolla, I knew from the time I was in middle school is like the place where Tommy was born, you know? And so it’s always had this, this… untouchable top of the mountain quality to me. And to be able to work here and to have my show be part of the legacy of shows that have started here, it’s really overwhelming.”
And in a way, feels like a seal of approval.
“If this place is cool with having one of my shows on their stages, I must be doing something right,” he beamed.
His show is “The Untitled, Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,” which is currently in the midst of its world premiere.
Iconis has always been fascinated by the unconventional author, played by Tony-winning actor Gabriel Ebert. He wasn’t old enough to see R-rated movies when the film version of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was released, so he had his grandparents take him.
“And they did not care for the film!” he laughed. “They were cool. I had cool grandparents. They were down, but that was … it was simply too much.”
With the musical, he set out to explore the public and what we know of the private personas of Hunter S. Thompson, without sugarcoating the story or making apologies.
Thompson was a man full of extremes, and deeply held beliefs, flaws and contradictions, and for Iconis, the perfect way to capture all of that is in song.
He’s not sure how the author felt about musicals, but he has a hunch.
“I feel very confident in saying that he probably hated them,” he said. “I think if someone told him there’s the musical about you, called ‘The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,’ he would probably have a lot of terrible things to say about it.”
Thompson is probably best known as the founder of gonzo journalism, although he didn’t always stick to the facts.
Take Oscar Zeta Acosta, played by actor George Salazar, who starred on Broadway in Iconis’ musical “Be More Chill.”
Acosta, who is mostly remembered as being the inspiration of the Dr. Gonzo character in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” was actually a powerful Mexican American activist.
In the book, Thompson altered his identity, depicting him as Samoan, and Acosta didn’t get any of the royalties from the story. Salazar said this musical sets to help reclaim his lost identity as an activist and public defender in LA.
“He once ran for sheriff of Los Angeles County with the intention of dismantling the sheriff’s department because of…rampant racism, specifically against the Chicano community in Los Angeles,” Salazar explained. “It’s an incredible opportunity for me, as a Latino, to shed some light on who this guy actually was. You know, he was fighting for people who had no voice.”
“I really wanted to put Oscar in a light that gave some weight to the incredible things that he did, and really showed him as not a cartoon, but as a man who really fought for Black and brown kids,” Iconis added. “Oscar Acosta was doing things in the ‘70s that we talk about now. And that feels so current and contemporary. And I wanted to give that some space on a stage.”
To achieve that, Iconis gave Salazar a powerhouse song called the “Ballad of the Brown Buffalo.”
“I wanted to make strength and his anger and his fire really at the forefront,” the composer said. “And I wanted to give him a number that felt like a showstopper. This man gets to have, you know, five minutes where he completely makes the audience forget who the hell Hunter S. Thompson is.”
Iconis has been working on this musical for years, and Salazar has been along for the ride.
Although he has officially relocated to Los Angeles, he said he’d go back to Broadway with this show should it head that way. He recently performed with Iconis and some of the cast members at the Bourbon Room in Hollywood. He said he owes so much of his life and career to the composer.
“He’s seen something in me that very few have,” Salazar said.
He remembers working on an assignment in college about the collaborations between Chita Rivera and Kander and Ebb and he described that kind of partnership, that mutual artistic appreciation, as “the dream.”
“To find a writer who gets you and who you get,” he explained. “With Joe…he writes lyrics that are so full. We don’t have to go searching for meaning. It’s all there in the text. So if you just pay attention to the words that you’re singing, you’re in for quite the ride.”
Given their frequent collaborations, does this make George Joe Iconis’ Chita?
“I’m one of his Chitas,” he laughed. “And, you know, it’s an honor for me to get to continue performing his work, to be trusted all these years. He’s my absolute favorite.”
“The Untitled, Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical” is running at the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre, one of the three main stages operated by La Jolla Playhouse.
Part of what makes the theater such a successful incubator Keen-Louie said is that even the big spaces are intimate. With just 400 seats — fewer than Broadway houses — artists and the creative team get immediate feedback from the audiences, allowing them to fine-tune the show as they go.
While they are fostering the creation of new art, they are also nurturing new artists. Being on a college campus, La Jolla produces works by UCSD’s MFA playwrights.
They maintain a rich internship program and have launched a directing and stage management fellowship — creating, in essence, a breeding ground for the next generation of theater makers.
“Theater makers, producers, designers, actors, everything that it takes, marketers, finance people, everything it takes to run a theater,” Keen-Louie said. “At some point, I’m going to want to retire and my hope is that there’s an incredible generation of people who we’re helping to guide who are going to be ready to take over.
So will this untitled, unauthorized, unconventional new musical be La Jolla’s next success story?
Iconis certainly thinks it could.
“I like the show,” he said humbly. “I don’t know if it’s good. I don’t know if it’s bad, but I know it’s really different than anything else that’s out there. And I’d like to believe that in 2023, a show that celebrates people who, don’t fit into a box, people who feel marginalized, people who feel like there’s not necessarily a place for them, a show that celebrates those people and puts them on a stage, I think is worthy of having some real estate on Broadway.”
“I think theater is conversation,” Keen-Louie said. “I think theater is about opening up dialogue amongst people about ideas and topics and subjects that we might have a really hard time doing when we’re just talking about the subject.”
“And we have to give our full attention to it,” he stressed. “I think it’s a beautiful way of saying, ‘Let’s celebrate a story and embrace a story and get off social media for a little bit of time…. but then go on social media and tell me how much you like it!’”