Our own Kid Vengeance sat down with Joe Iconis, the composer and writer of a new musical, “Bloodsong of Love: the Rock and Roll Spaghetti Western”, which opens this Thursday, April 1st, at the Ars Nova theater in New York. Tickets are available at arsnovanyc.com/
The Kid: Want to start by giving me a little introduction to Bloodsong?
Joe Iconis: It’s called Bloodsong of Love: the Rock and Roll Spaghetti Western, and it’s being done in a theater called Ars Nova on 54th and 10th avenue. I was their composer in residence in 2008, and part of it was that you got a small commission to write a musical. They commission a bunch of artists for a bunch of nonprofit and for-profit theaters, and if something happens to come out of it, awesome, and if not, this is money that they’re giving to a writer. So they commissioned me to write a show about anything, and I was looking for something original to do in this theater, which is a really cool place.
The theater itself is really beautiful, really well stocked with technological business, but it’s kind of small. The stage is kind of small, so I got excited about writing something huge for a very small space. That’s where the first impulse to write a Spaghetti Western came from. I’m a huge movie fan and I’ve always loved Spaghetti Westerns. I’m not obsessed with them in the way that I’m obsessed with other genres of movies, but I always associated them with big sprawling landscapes and hugeness of setting and hugeness of emotion. It was very exciting to me to think about writing something in that context for a very tiny space. Like, what would happen with this thing that I associate with everything that’s huge — you know, gunfights and revenge and death and blood and all that stuff — if I put it in this tiny and claustrophobic space? So that’s kind of where the idea originated from.
In the original version of the show, it was half the Spaghetti Western itself and half the story of the actors performing the Spaghetti Western. I felt like if I just wrote a straight-up Spaghetti Western it would be seen as a parody, and I felt like there were things that I wanted to write about that might not fit with just a straight-up Spaghetti Western. So, it was the story of these artists putting this show on, and it was in this world where there was not a lot of love for the artists and where it’s easier to take the different road and sort of big ideas of staying true to ideals, stuff like that, interspersed with the Spaghetti Western. But over the course of writing it, the two things came together, so now it’s a straight-up Spaghetti Western that incorporates those themes into it.
What’s cool is that I never would have written this show as it is now if i hadn’t written the other version with half of it being the story about these real people struggling with real issues in present-day NY. I’m excited about how it turned out, it feels pretty organic, and it also speaks to the theater itself, Ars Nova, for letting me do that, sticking with it and really developing the show, as opposed to just saying, “Ah, this seems weird.”
KV: Other than the hugeness and grandeur of the Spaghetti Western, what did you take from the genre?
JI: I mean, for me, there’s a bunch of things — one of the things was just the more sensational aspects about them — I love the gore, I love the long passages of not a lot happening, with punctuations of extreme violence, of explosions.
KV: Like the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West?
JI: I love the — it’s a very filmic thing — but holding off the action for as long as humanly possible, and it’s not really done in most movies anymore, and it’s insane that Spaghetti Westerns were popular even in a cult way when they came out, to look at them today, because I feel like a lot of people could watch them and be like “This is so boring, there’s no action here,” but it’s so satisfying to wait for that, then get something humongous.
KV: I feel like that must even be more difficult on the stage.
JI: It totally is, so of course, so many things that make Spaghetti Westerns Spaghetti Westerns, you couldn’t do on the stage, and you shouldn’t do on the stage, so for me it’s been about finding ways to translate those things to the stage. One huge thing about Spaghetti Westerns is the whole dubbing thing, that you would have three different people in a scene speaking in three different languages, and then their voices are dubbed in many cases by actors who aren’t those actors, and it just creates this immediate unsettledness to this world, this very unmistakable something-isn’t-right-here feeling, this off-kilter-edness that adds to the anything-could-happen-at-any-time, you know, anyone could kill someone else, whatever could happen. I wasn’t as interested in doing goofy jokes about people’s mouths moving and something different coming out, but then for me it became about creating this world where the geography and the time frame were sort of screwed. It technically takes place on the border of Texas and Mexico, but we have tons of references to things that you just wouldn’t find in Texas or Mexico — they drink Narragansett beer, the time frame is all over the place — it could be modern day, or it could be 1968 or it could be 1900. It became very exciting to create this place where the footing felt unsure, and different, and I hope it gives you the feel of watching one of those movies.
KV: That’s interesting, because I feel like in recent days, attempts to make movies in a Spaghetti Western style tend to set them in a very unreal world — make them apocalyptic
, or add Zombies
, the Undead
, or inappropriate technology, and it’s interesting that you would directly connect that to the dubbing, to the off-kilter world of the Spaghetti Western, which is ostensibly taking on a very historical and grounded subject matter. What about from a musical perspective — we do nothing but draw heavily from soundtracks — was that an influence for you?
JI: Absolutely — it’s called “the Rock and Roll Spaghetti Western,” but it’s not like a Spring Awakening kind of thing where it’s people in period clothes rocking out. There is a rock and roll element to the show, and I feel like it’s rock and roll in spirit more than anything else, but musically it’s very influenced by Spaghetti Western soundtracks — Ennio Morricone, and all the big guys.
KV: Any soundtracks in particular?
JI: I love Fist Full of Dollars, I love the Django
soundtrack a lot, even just the title song of Django was very inspirational, it just kind of rocks and is really beautiful, but it also has that goofiness to it that i really love.
KV: I feel like as elegant as all of the Spaghetti Western music is, whenever they have the vocal themes, they always go off in this silly direction, it’s surprising how unrestrained they are.
JI: Also the sound effects in the scores of a lot of these movies definitely inspired a lot of the choices that I made. A lot of these movies were set in the past and were trying to be historically accurate, but in the scores there’s so much electric guitar, it’s just this undeniable thing to me, that the Spaghetti Western — they came out of another time, you’re hearing these guitars and it’s just such an exciting thing that connects that time period that is at a distance to the audience, it immediately connects it to them and becomes the music of the characters as opposed to the setting for the time period.
KV: That’s also a common thing, connecting the music to the specific characters. Is that something you do at all?
JI: Yeah, absolutely. The characters have their own themes, and that was also an exciting thing to work on because that’s something that is done in musicals a lot — characters have their song and it’s reprised — but this show is pretty heavily underscored in a way that most musicals aren’t so it was really exciting to approach it like a film score, like with different themes and instruments being associated with different people and how those things weave in and out with each other. If someone is speaking and someone else’s theme is playing under them, what does that mean, what is that foreshadowing, what is that referencing? All of that stuff was really fun to play with.
KV: I’m curious about the artists-in-residence program, because I think most of us understand the traditional music band dream path, playing shows, selling albums, getting bigger, but i think fewer of us are aware of how a playwright or composer approaches his career.
JI: It’s such a weird thing, I’m still finding my way in the world. I went to NYU for undergrad and grad school, graduated in 2005 — they have a graduate musical theater writing program — I’ve always wanted to write musicals. I spent a lot of the time just trying to play my songs and get people to listen to me. I’m a huge fan of real people music, and bands, and whatnot, and I was sort of familiar with that whole band thing — play a million shows, hope someone will come, sell some records, get a deal. I kind of approached the world of theater music like that. For me, I just gotta do shows, which hasn’t necessarily been a lot but because of that, I ended up with a group of people who I perform with a lot and they kind of felt like a band, but we were doing musical theater stuff. We approached the whole thing like having a band for musical theater performance, just doing shows around. That’s how I first got my name out there. Then I won a couple of musical theater writing awards, which came with some money attached, which was very sweet, which allowed me to not have to take a day job and that sort of thing. I’ve gotten a couple of really cool opportunities to write stuff, and I’ve had stuff produced, and I feel like everything I’ve done is like steps up.
I got involved with the Ars Nova program just from them knowing my stuff around town, and it was very cool. It involved a bunch of very different things, one of which was weekly meetings where we would get together and talk about things we’ve seen. We were supposed to have written reports of things we’d seen, which I was really bad at turning in, and it felt very much like being in high school and not doing homework and the principal being mad at you. But the best thing about it was that it just felt like I had a home somewhere where I could go and talk with other artists about career matters and a place where they would give me a little bit of money to write something, and like hey if this works out, great, and if not, no big deal. And that’s the biggest thing about programs like that, because it’s easy to feel kind of lost in this world because it’s so big and there are no rules and I’ve been in professional situations where I feel like everyone hates me, you know, where it’s like I’m the last person in the whole world that people with money want in the room, and with Ars Nova, it’s amazing to not feel like that, to feel like they actually want you there.
KV: What about that poster? It’s amazing!
JI: Thanks, dude, I’m like in love with the poster. I’m very much obsessed with movie posters, and I love the publicity aspect of entertainment in general, like, even for concerts, I’m very insane about the art that’s put out to the world. So it was very important to me that we had a poster that honored Spaghetti Western posters of the past. I’m completely blanking on the name of the guy who painted it, I’ll email it , but I worked on it with him and Stephen Tartic who’s the marketing director at Ars Nova, and the creative director, and we talked about a million ideas and they went through a billion versions of the poster, and ended up deciding on that one, and I’m so happy with it. It was just very important that it was a poster that honored the posters of the past.
KV: Which is a genre in itself, the Spaghetti Western poster, and I think it really captures it excellently.
JI: And I’m a huge font nerd, so even just going over fonts, it was the most fun emails I’ve ever gotten in my whole life. “This one’s too goofy, this one’s not goofy enough.” I’m really proud of the poster and the tagline — “His story will break your heart and the song will stop it.” It’s like my favorite thing I’ve ever done. In another world, if there was someone who just sat in a room and wrote movie tag lines, I would kill to be that person. That would be my dream job.
KV: I think there was a bygone era of exploitation, where you’d write the tagline and make the poster and then see if people like it, then bang the script out. That’s the AIP approach.
JI: I wish that musicals could be done like that. It’s funny, I actually did this once. There’s this show that I wrote called “ReWrite” which is a triple feature of mini musicals. I had this one twenty-minute musical that I liked a lot, but I didn’t know if it could be extended because it’s sort of weird in the way it screws with time, and I thought it should just exist as its own little thing, so I was just like “I should write two other musicals that are unrelated to go with this and do this triple features thing.” So I hadn’t written it, I just wanted to perform it. So I made the poster for it with the names of two other shows without even knowing what the shows were really going to be about, and actually I did it at Ars Nova as a concert. I called them and pretended I had written it, like “Hey, I have this show, could I get a date to just kind of do it on the stage?” and they were like “yeah, sure, in five weeks” — oh, okay, I’ll have to write it then, cause it will be on in five weeks. That was one of those things where the poster came first.
KV: It sounds like you really play with the constraints of musical theater structures — How rigidly are musicals expected to conform to a structure, and how have you been able to play with that?
JI: You know, it’s funny because I love musicals. I love classic musicals, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Sondheim, I do have a passionate love for it, but I also have a passionate love for film and music. And for me, it’s just I have found myself having to take a look at the rules for musical theater, because it’s weird — it’s such a weirdly rule-defined art form these days. I feel like when you talk to people who like musicals, there are all these things that people believe that musicals must have, this structure. You need this thing called an “I Want” song, where the hero of the musical says all the things that he wants, which will then lead us on this journey through the rest of the musical. And that song will have to be the second song in the show, and there has to be an opening number that sets us up with the whole show, and there’s this thing called the “charm song” where you like the hero in the musical, and it’s usually performed with the romantic interest in the musical. All these things that to me are just completely distancing and when I see a musical with those things in mind, I spot it and completely tune out. For me, I just don’t approach it like, “Oh, I have to do this and I have to do that.” Even with acts, most traditional musicals are two acts, and for me, anything I’ve ever written, I haven’t even thought about that until I’ve gotten to the show. Even the Spaghetti Western show, it started as a one act-er, and in rehearsal the last couple of weeks, it just became obvious that we needed it to be in two acts. It was organic, it came out of what we had. To me, the exciting thing is being surprised by things. I just feel like a lot of shows that I’ve written that are in some way sort of structurally weird, but the ones that are out of the norm, I know that I could look at that show and write in a way that’s more digestible for musical theater audiences, but it just feels really false to me, to me it’s about the story and the characters, and what those things call for.
KV: What are your favorite Spaghetti Westerns?
JI: I love all the Sergio Leone ones. I feel like I don’t know as much about Spaghetti Westerns as I should, having written a musical. I feel like I know the big stuff. I really love a A Fistful of Dollars
, it’s such a special movie to me. The Good, the Bad & the Ugly
. But as far as inspiration, i was the most inspired by the lore of the Spaghetti Westerns and the actors in them, like Lee Van Cleef and his persona. Something that I love about those movies is that so many of the actors were in different ones, it sort of takes on this feel of a stock company of actors who just take on different parts — play the villain over here, and the hero over here. That’s sort of pertinent to the show — everyone except the main character doubles, everyone is playing at least two different roles, which to me came out of people who were in all these movies. Fistful of Dollars is probably my favorite of all of them.
KV: Did you go through a process of rewatching, seeking some out?
JI: Yeah, I totally did, but I wrote the first pass at it without returning to a lot of them. And then, after doing that, I’ve gone back and watched a bunch, and I feel like they’ve seeped in. I’m not so into taking one character from here and one character from here. It was important to me not just to have it be a musical of references to Spaghetti Westerns. If I tried to do that, I would just fail miserably, because I would feel like if I’m gonna do that I’d need to watch every single Spaghetti Western made ever.
KV: And you’d be appealing to the one other person out there who had.
JI: We’d probably fill the theater one night with people who’d really get off on the references. But for me it was more about the overall feel of it, and the overall lore. And there’re archetypal Spaghetti Western characters, like the main character doesn’t have a name, he’s known only as “the Musician,” and there’s the bartender, and there’s sort of a best friend character. But yeah, for me it was more about taking a feel and translating certain aspects of plot and characters into what it is .
KV: Do you feel like you sit and you watch the musical and it has that gritty thrilling feel?
JI: I think so, I think it really does, I hope it does. We just added the band in it yesterday for the first time and I got to hear the score orchestrated with trumpets and harmonica and all that sort of stuff , and I do, I feel like without referencing specific things, it captures the feel of Spaghetti Western. The show itself is essentially about this man whose name is Musician who’s on a journey to reclaim his bride from this kazoo playing superstar, this evil bastard. And the hero has a guitar that plays music so beautiful that it kills people, and he’s kind of a pacifist who doesn’t like guns, doesn’t like violence, but he almost can’t help it that he’s playing this music that’s so gorgeous that it’s murdering people. And it’s this simple story — this person took something from me and I’m going to get it back — and in so many Spaghetti Westerns, the story is so simple — this town needs help, so I’m going to help this town, but then it’s 3 hours of all this stuff. That’s something that we’ve captured, the actual nuts and bolts of what’s happening isn’t particularly complicated, but then there are all of these other complications and other people that get in the way of what would basically be a straight line, which is very much a Spaghetti Western thing.
KV: You also mentioned before the other genres you’re obsessed with. What are those?
I guess I’m more into directors than genres, but I’m a big horror movie fan, I’m a huge Robert Altman fan, I love him very much. He’s definitely an influential artist on most of the stuff that I do. I feel like that’s where a lot of my character obsession comes from. Because so many of his movies are just about the human beings and the story kind of comes later, and that’s something I try to be doing.
KV: Do you have a favorite Altman?
JI: Nashville
is my favorite movie of all time. But 3 Women
, A Perfect Couple
— have you seen that?
KV: No.
JI: it’s really, really great, he made it in the late 70’s and it was his stab at a romantic comedy and the best part, if you read interviews with him he’s just like, “I was just mimicking a romantic comedy, a type of movie everyone loves, I just figured i’d make one,” but to watch it and think someone thought they were just making a romantic comedy is the most insane thing. Do you know Paul Dooley? He’s the dad in Sixteen Candles
? I guess? He’s in a million things. He plays this older overweight guy who’s looking to date this girl who he finds on a video dating service. And the girl lives in a commune with these hippies, and they have a band and it’s sort of a musical, and like half the stuff is interspersed with someone experiencing the movie. You should check it out, it’s insane.
I’m more interested in taking from, and putting things in the world of Spaghetti Westerns, and something that’s Robert Altman – ish, or David Lynch – ish, as opposed to Nashville musical.
KV: Is there another genre you have your eye on for your next musical?
JI: Well, I’m commissioned by the La Hoya Playhouse to write a musical about Hunter S. Thompson which I’m excited about, and that’s the next big thing I’ll be working on. I haven’t even started yet, and it just seems like the hugest thing of all time, I don’t even know what it’s going to be about. It’s going to be about Hunter S. Thompson, but he lived quite a life with so, so many aspects to it. I don’t know how that’s going to translate into the piece as a whole, what it’s going to feel like, what it’s going to move like, how the story’s going to move, I just know that it’s going to have Hunter S. Thompson at the center. I feel like there’s a lot of potential for some songs. It would provide a cool opportunity to look at him in a way that he’s not usually portrayed. He was so much about playing a character and posturing and being huge outwardly, and I think that was him, as much as he was playing a character, the character was him, but I’m really excited about the idea of being able to have that and then also being able to carry that to what he’s actually thinking and going through. And it has a built-in great ending: fireworks!
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…and don’t forget to check out Showdown at the BK Corral worlds first/only Spaghetti Western Concept Rap Album
, himself! Check it out at 
