Will Roland, Coby Getzug, Harrison Chad and Jimmy Brewer in “The Black Suits.” Photo by Craig Schwartz.
It’s two nights before The Black Suits’ first preview performance at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. Joe Iconis — who wrote the book, music and lyrics — sits in a room at the top of the stairs of Center Theatre Group’s Culver City venue, speaking passionately about the project he wrote at NYU graduate school. While the band rocks loudly in the background, Iconis says he’s a bit frazzled by the intense process of mounting the premiere of this musical about a Long Island high school garage band, but also extremely pleased. This production, which opens Sunday, has been a long time coming.
“I wrote the first version of the show in 2005,” says Iconis. “I was in the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing program at NYU, and for my thesis I had to write a full-scale musical.”
Iconis just happens to be from Garden City on Long Island, the backdrop for the story. And although he admits there’s a lot of himself in the piece, he was never actually in a garage band. He was “a straight-up theater kid,” he says.
“I got the idea to write the show when I musical directed The Wiz at my old high school when I was in college,” Iconis says. …
Read full article at LA Stage Times.
Jessica Koslow 