A Conversation with Joe Iconis

On writing Be More Chill, Sondheim's influence on his work, and the future of Broadway

Theater artists who break the mold often cite Stephen Sondheim as an influence, but few articulate that connection quite as thoughtfully as Joe Iconis. It was a real pleasure to talk to Joe, who is perhaps best known as the composer-lyricist of Be More Chill, about his own creative journey, Sondheim’s influence on his work, and the future of original musicals on Broadway. Our conversation begins below:

It’s so great to meet you. I know that you were a real theater kid, and I’m always fascinated by how Sondheim fits into that story. Did Sondheim’s work feature heavily when you were growing up and starting out?

Yeah. I was very lucky in that the first musical that I ever saw was Little Shop of Horrors. September 27th, 1987: my sixth birthday. I loved it and fell in love with theater in general immediately. At that time, the original production of Into the Woods was still playing, and so Into the Woods was the second show I ever saw. So Sondheim really entered my life almost as early as he possibly could have: Menkin and Ashman only beat him by a few months. Into the Woods shaped my understanding of what theater was. So, literally, I can’t remember a time when I was in love with theater and not also in love with Sondheim.

And I know that you cite him as an influence—but certainly not the only influence—on your work. Tell me a little about arriving at college, when you almost stopped listening to musical theater entirely. Did you have a strong sense of needing to be fed by other kinds of music too?

Yeah. I think that it was making the jump from high school to college. In high school, just personally, socially, I had a tight-knit group of friends and I felt very comfortable being surrounded by the people I was comfortable with, and less comfortable branching out into the world. And as far as colleges in the States go, NYU is basically not a college. There’s nothing that feels collegiate about it. There’s no real campus: the campus is just the city. So you really can feel isolated there if you’re not someone who is good at making friends, if you’re not someone who feels comfortable putting themselves out there in social situations—which I was not at the time.

Once I got there, I started reappraising everything in my life, and I went through a big change as a man that was instigated by these four years of undergrad. But part of that was like me saying, “I should know music that is not original cast albums.” It was part of this larger life transformation, and so it was really then that I started actively seeking out other types of music. And it wasn’t that I turned my back on theater. I still loved theater and would still go to theater all the time. But the more I investigated other types of music, the more I fell in love with it.

And at that point, arriving at NYU, how specific were your ambitions? Did you know you wanted to write book, music, and lyrics, or were you focused initially on just one or two of the three?

Pre-college, I always imagined that I would be a composer for theater. As early as 12 years old, I have it on record: I had written down that what I want to be when I grow up is a Broadway composer. For as long as I had a real “this is what I want to do when I grow up” answer, it was always to be a composer of musicals. I imagined that it would just be music, and that I’d be working with a lyricist.

When I got to NYU, I was working with a private composition teacher, who was the first proper musical theater writing teacher I ever had. And he said, “Okay, if you want to write musicals, you need lyrics. And you have two choices. You can either find a lyricist, which would mean going out to the NYU student body, going out into the larger world of New York City, finding a collaborator, someone to write some lyrics, and then you write the music. Or you can try writing them yourself.”

At the time, as I said, I was very socially uncomfortable. The idea of going out to the student body felt terrifying to me. It’s like, “I’m going to have to be vulnerable in front of people. I’m going to have to put myself in situations where I don’t feel comfortable. That sounds like a terrible idea. I’m just going to write the lyrics myself.” And so I started writing lyrics truly out of terror of having to speak to other people.

By the time I got to the end of my four years of undergrad at NYU, the lyrics had become just as important as the music to me. I had dabbled in lyric writing before, but was always too afraid go for it. And when I say go for it, I think I was too afraid to allow myself to be vulnerable in a way that I think you have to to be a good lyricist. The rigor of it scared me. I’ve always had a natural inclination towards music, and music is for all intents and purposes relatively easy for me—but lyrics are hard. Music felt like fun, but lyrics felt like work. It scared me to think about actually devoting my life to that. But like I said, the more I did it, the more I fell in love with it, and the more I found my voice as a writer by joining the music and the lyrics. By the time I finished my undergrad, they became inseparable.

The book component of that was that I always imagined that I would like to write book. Because I had such a love of theater, I had a pretty good idea of how classic musical theater books were written, and how they operated. And so I always thought, “Oh, maybe I'll try my hand at that one day.” I took a playwriting course my senior year at NYU. It was the first playwriting course I ever took, the first time I was really writing dialogue, writing scenes. There were people from all different disciplines who were in the class, and I felt really comfortable doing it. I was good at it, in a way that was surprising to me—and to everyone else in the class. It was one of those situations where I would bring in a scene and everyone would be like, “Oh, that guy is good?” I was so unassuming. I was just this quiet, awkward, strange-looking guy. But I took to it very naturally.

When I went on to my graduate work, also at NYU, at the Tisch Musical Theatre Writing program, I was a words person and a music person. In that program, lyrics and book are combined. And so I ended up studying all three, and now I love doing all three. It’s funny. Unless you’re one of the ordained musical theater writers who've gotten a great New York Times review where they say you’re good at doing all three, whenever you’re like, “Yes, I do all three,” people look at you like, “Oh, really? you think you can do all three?” And it depends. I don’t always do all three, but I do love it. It’s very organic to me. My goal whenever I'm writing a musical is to have it feel like the language is the same in the songs and in the book. I hate when it feels like the lyrics and the book are written by two different writers—which a lot of times they are, and they can still feel unified—but I hate when it feels disjointed unintentionally. And so for me, when I’m writing all three, it’s very hard, but there is a kind of fluidity to it that I really enjoy.

If you had to sum up how Sondheim’s work feeds into your own, how would you go about that? Stylistically your own work might at first seem quite different, and you incorporate all these other influences too—but in terms of the actual craft, how would you articulate what his work gives you as a writer?

I think for starters, as you alluded to, a lot of times when I say that Sondheim has been really influential on me, people are kind of surprised. On the surface, it seems like the two of us could not be more diametrically opposed. It really feels like my stuff has no relation to his—which is the intent, because when I’m writing, I want my music and my lyric to feel representative of the character who is singing it and representative of the world in which the show is taking place. I want the sonic and lyrical world of Be More Chill to specifically be that, and I want the sonic and lyrical world of my Hunter S. Thompson musical to be that—and those two things don’t sound very much alike, and so why would they sound like Sondheim musicals?

But I’ve been so influenced by him, in an almost embarrassing way to me. And what’s so funny is I’ll hear a song and I’ll think, “I’m just ripping that off from a Sondheim song”—but people would never in a million years think that. And for me, there are the more surface-y things of Sondheim that for sure I was inspired by, like his predilection toward musicalizing characters who wouldn’t typically be given the musical theater treatment. Sweeney Todd is, of course, the example that everyone uses when they say, “It’s a crazy idea for a musical, but look, someone made a musical about a barber who killed people and makes pies out of them.”

Growing up, Assassins was probably the show for me that was the most galvanizing and influential on my young mind, and subsequently on my own writing. Taking characters who on the surface might seem bad—characters who are normally the villains in other stories—and not only allowing them depth and allowing their point of view to be heard, but treating them with compassion, is something that I think can’t be overstated. And he did it time and time again.

Even Here We Are, which I love, it’s taking these people who are “unlikable,” these people who would be a joke in another show, and really treating them like leads. He treats all the characters like they’re the lead in their own musicals, and they all have depth and they all have weight—and I think that’s something that people take for granted about him. It’s something that has so influenced me, and I’ll never be able to shake it. I’ll never be able to get away from that type of writing. And honestly, it’s writing that usually is not embraced. A lot of musicals that are successful have very clearly defined good characters and bad characters. It’s just never that clean in a Sondheim show—and of course that’s the book too, but so much of it is his writing.

So, there’s that. But when I think of Sondheim, the number one thing that I think of is simplicity. And with simplicity comes clarity. Of course he was an amazing wordsmith, and of course his lyrics are so smart and he has all these songs that are very flowery or puzzle-like, or things where the wordplay of them feels exciting. But I think for the most part, he was able to boil very complicated ideas down into a shockingly small number of words. Obviously, something like “Losing My Mind” is a perfect example of that. There are really not a lot of words in it, and it says so much. The words are so specifically chosen, even when they don’t sound specifically chosen.

I feel like people often talk about his work like it’s very rigid, and it’s not. His stuff is so loose, and it gives actors so much freedom to play. His stuff feels conversational, but at the same time it’s obviously thought out within an inch of its life. So, that is something that I always go back to actively, where I’m not literally saying to myself, “What would Sondheim do?” But I’m thinking about songs of his that I love, and moments that I love. I think of the simplicity and I think of how clear the lyrics are. Even when the lyrics are doing 45 different things, you always understand them. You always know exactly what he's saying. The clarity and the simplicity of his lyric writing is the thing that I continue to be inspired by, and I imagine I always will.

That’s beautiful. I’d love to know a little more about those parts of the writing process we don’t usually get to hear so much about. Were there any wrong turns or dead ends along the path toward the huge success of Be More Chill? It would be so interesting to hear how you overcame some of those challenges.

I’ve had countless moments like that. Unlike some others, Be More Chill was a show where the basic story, the basic machinations of the plot, the basic characters never really changed—partly because Be More Chill is based on a novel. We had that template, and so we knew the things that we wanted to stick to, and the things we wanted to deviate from. And the late, great Ned Vizzini, who wrote the novel, he in a lot of ways did that work for us. He took care of the, “Oh, I thought this character was one thing, but he’s actually another.”

But there is a song in Be More Chill called “Two-Player Game.” For the longest time, it was a song called “Level Up.” And for anyone who knows Be More Chill, “Two-Player Game” is these two best friends who are having a meaningful conversation about what they want out of life and their relationship to each other, but they’re doing it while playing a video game. And they’re doing it using the language that they speak, which is “teenage boy who doesn’t want to talk about his feelings and would rather talk about something else.” To me, that song, and most of Be More Chill, is written in a foreign language, and that language is anxiety-ridden teenager. They’re just going to say and admit things differently than another sort of person would.

Be More Chill (Maria Baranova)

The song “Level Up” always went over really well, and I always hated it—and I hated it for a few reasons. The first reason was it got across the idea, it got across what I just said, but I felt like it did it in a way that felt cheap. It felt like the best thing about the song was the setup—two boys are talking about their feelings while playing a video game—and I just felt like I didn’t deliver on the promise of that. The song never got better than the idea of the song. So it lasted in the show, because it was doing okay. Everyone liked it and everyone got what the moment was supposed to be. We did it in readings, everyone was satisfied, and it didn’t get in the way of anything—but I always knew I was going to rewrite this song. But then, the more readings you do, one year, two years, and the song is still there. Then you start to doubt yourself and you’re like, “Was my impulse wrong about this song? Is this song good? Am I just holding it up to some standard that it’s never going to meet, or that it doesn’t need to meet? Why would I mess with something that’s working well?”

But then we were in rehearsal for the Two River production, which was the world premiere production. It was the first time it was ever going to actually be on a stage in front of people. And I was just like, “Nope. I'm rewriting it.” The thought of a paying audience seeing it… I was like, “I’m totally right. I don’t care if every person around me tells me that this song is doing what it needs to do. I know it can be better. I know it can be deeper. I know it can say more about the characters and about the show as a whole.” And so I ended up rewriting it really quickly—and it’s the song that people know today, and I'm so glad I did.

The other thing about “Level Up” is that I realized after I wrote it that I was unintentionally ripping off a previously existing song by The Clash. It was something that no one has ever once been able to pinpoint. This might be the first time I’ve ever said publicly that it was a Clash song, but I always thought I was ripping a song that exists. No one ever heard it, ever, ever, ever. I probably wrote “Level Up” 10 years ago now, and no one’s ever been like, “Oh my God, it’s that song.” But I knew. And even if I said the name of the song, people might still be like, “I don’t really hear it”—but I hear it, and I could never let it go out there, knowing where it came from. So yeah, that’s one little example, and there are 10 million others like that.

That’s fascinating. And you gave a beautiful speech when Be More Chill closed on Broadway, in which you thanked your producers for taking a chance on a show that’s not based on a famous movie and doesn’t star Hugh Jackman. I thought that comment got to the heart of a much broader conversation about what kinds of shows get made, and which shows are actually able to make it to Broadway. How do you see the environment today for young writers, writers with original ideas, and who might not have access to huge stars or to existing IP?

I try very hard to be hopeful and optimistic about all this stuff, as challenging as it is. Listen, throughout the history of Broadway, there have been shows starring famous people, shows that feel corporate, shows that are not necessarily high art, that have existed probably with the initial impulse to make some money. I think the thing that’s different now is that there used to be more of the other type of show. It used to feel a little bit more even. You had what we think of as classic musical theatre: How to Succeed in Business or Guys and Dolls. You had those shows that sat alongside the others. The two types of art could coexist.

And to me, that’s what Broadway is. That’s what that I love about Broadway. It’s a neighborhood, sort of, but it’s really an idea. And it’s this idea that all of these different types of performing arts can exist in very close proximity to each other. Now, it does feel like the scale is a bit tipped currently, where the majority of shows are based on very popular IP—which really just means produced by corporations. If a huge movie could become a musical and be solely artist-driven—like, if there is some artist out there who is so moved by Jurassic Park, has a personal connection to it, and all they want is to make a musical out of it—I bet it would be pretty good. Or at the very least, it would feel different from a lot of these other movie-to-musical adaptations that we see.

I think something like Hairspray is a great example, and Hairspray obviously came out quite a long time ago. I feel like with Hairspray, even though it’s a movie-to-musical adaptation, you can feel from all of those writers just how connected they personally were to those characters. It felt like it might as well have been an original musical. And you really feel it when it’s that—as opposed to people being hired to make this product, and then getting notes from the studio, and then having to have everyone in costumes that are the same costumes from the movie, and it becoming more about merchandising than the actual musical.

That’s the thing that bugs me about so many of these huge shows: I go to see them and I just think, “This didn’t have to be as bad as it is. I don’t think an audience would like this any less if it was good.” But because these things are so corporate, you end up where there are so many uninformed voices in the room—and the product you end up with is the least offensive version of itself. It’s the version that has all of the edges smoothed out. It’s the version that people up above think is what the audience wants. The problem is that I don’t actually believe the audience wants it. But if you just keep giving them that product, it’s going to be all they know.

For me, the problem with where Broadway is at right now, and the problem with the sorts of shows that get to Broadway, is that I think we are actively changing the taste of the theatergoing public. And that scares me. Already, the average family who’s not necessarily a theater family, they feel like, “Why would I spend $1,000 to go see a show that I’ve never heard of? I’m going to go see Aladdin.” Or, “Why would I go see a show without a movie star for the same amount of money as I can go see a show with a movie star?” And that’s a bummer to me, because people used to go to the theater and not know exactly what they were going to get. People used to go to the theater and want to take a chance. Maybe they heard the show was really good, and that of course still happens. But people would go and be excited to be surprised—and now it feels like people actually get pissed off when the thing does not meet their expectation, when the thing is not exactly what they thought it was going to be.

Years ago, the Broadway production of Mamma Mia started using a particular tagline, and I truly believe that this tagline is the thing that started changing Broadway. The tagline was, “You already know you’re gonna love it.” I saw it on a billboard, and I thought, “That’s it. That is it. This is the beginning of the end.” It’s that thinking that I think is ruining us—“you already know you’re gonna love it”—because I think, “Then why the hell are you going? Just watch it at home. It’s a lot cheaper to watch the movie, or to go to karaoke and sing the songs.”

However, having said all of that, any time there’s a show that doesn’t do those things, and is a success, it does nothing but help the cause. It just makes all of the people who make decisions, the people who control things, the people who perhaps have money on their mind more than art, it makes them look at the thing and go, “Oh, okay, so if that works, maybe this will work too.” And so I think that anyone who has it in their heart to write original musicals, to write musicals that aren’t based on Jurassic Park, now more than ever, we must keep doing it. It’s the thing that’s going to keep the art form going. It really is.

It’s been so great to talk to you. What’s coming up for you soon that you’re particularly excited about?

Two things, actually. I have my annual Christmas show at 54 Below. It’s The 14th Annual Joe Iconis Christmas Extravaganza, and it’s a twisted version of the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show. It has a cast of about 70 people, all crammed into 54 Below, which is a very small cabaret space. It’s definitely become a cult New York City holiday tradition. I’m really proud of it, and so I hope people come and check it out. And then, next year, we’re doing The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical, which is my new musical at the Signature Theatre in Washington, DC. I’m so proud of this show. I want everyone to come see it. Hopefully, post-Washington, DC, we’ll be able to come into New York City with it. That’s the hope and the dream.