When you talk with Joe Iconis, it’s clear that you’re talking with a writer. Introspective yet expressive, it seems like everything Iconis says is constantly being revised—you can almost see him writing out everything he says, then going back and erasing it, starting over again, trying to find the perfect way to communicate the thoughts in his head.

One of New York’s up-and-coming musical theater composers, Iconis’ first show, “The Black Suits,” is currently playing in its West Coast premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Santa Monica. It’s a nice treat for young musical theater fans on this side of the country, who are often relegated to watching YouTube clips of new musical theater concerts and shows in New York.

We had the chance to sit down and chat with Iconis in downtown Culver City, just down the street from the theater (read the full transcript here). The writer, whose main artistic influences are Robert Altman and Steven Sondheim, is happy that his show is being exposed to a wider audience—it was his thesis at NYU, so it’s something he’s been working on for quite a while. Writing this show has been a unique experience, because, as he says, “There’s parts of the show, where, if I was starting writing ‘The Black Suits’ now, I totally wouldn’t do, I would approach in a totally different way […] Working on it now has been a lot about negotiating my current writer self with the voice that first started writing it.”

The impetus to write “The Black Suits,” which is about a high school garage band competing in the Battle of the Bands at the end of the summer, came from his own experiences conducting the pit band of a high school musical, and noting the parallels between the end of the summer and the end of a show. He was also motivated to write a show with complex teenage characters, saying, “I loved the idea of having a show that was about high school-aged kids, where all of the characters couldn’t be boiled down to one sentence,” as opposed to standard archetypes.

In writing the show, Iconis aimed to give it a timeless quality. “I’ve always felt like it didn’t want to be set in a particular year, I felt like it should always feel like now, and should always feel like someone who is twenty years older than me could look at it and be like, ‘Oh, this kinda feels like when I was kid.’” Though he thinks that the score is a traditional musical theater score in terms of how the songs are constructed, he’s adamant that the show has a distinctly “rock and roll spirit to it,” and wrote a rock-infused score to reflect.

Iconis is immensely glad that audiences are getting the chance to see his work live on stage, as opposed to on YouTube or in a cabaret setting, the milieus that tend to be the most common for up-and-coming composers. He’s not opposed to gaining notoriety through YouTube, but that’s not his endgame: “I see it as a way to get my stuff out to a broader audience, but it’s not, in and of itself, something I’m necessarily interested in getting to the top of the YouTube mountain.” Similarly, since the story comes before the songs for Iconis, he often forgets that people who have only encountered his work through clips from cabarets don’t always understand the context.

He’s gotten used to his songs being taken out of context though, and he stands by his songs’ ability to stand on their own—as he says, “The songs that I have that are in concerts, a lot of them are intentionally written to have multiple interpretations, I love people making their own decisions about songs and characters.” Take, for example, what might be his most famous song, “Broadway, Here I Come,” which was featured on the second season of “Smash,” and, as it was originally written, has a very dark tone to it: “On the show, it totally takes on a different meaning, when the cut of the song that they had on the show is what is played, and for me, that’s totally fine, because for me, it’s like, on on the album, it’s the full version, and anyone who cares can listen to the song and can take what they want to take from it.” He calls working with the “Smash” team “very surreal and wild,” but is grateful for the opportunity to work on something on as large in scale as the show.

Up next for the young composer? An adaptation of Ned Vizzini’s young adult book “Be More Chill,” in which high schoolers can ingest computers in pill form that can help out their popularity. He’s working on finishing up the show with collaborator Joe Tracz, and it will play at the Two River Theatre in New Jersey.

Iconis urges young composers to “not to be afraid to put yourself out there. I think that getting out of your own way is a huge thing, and just being fearless about playing your stuff for people, and not being afraid of what people say about it.” He also underlines the importance of being familiar with the musical theater landscape, past and present, because “even if you don’t dig most of musical theater, it’s really helpful to know how you fit in to the bigger picture.”

Mr. Iconis seems pretty well aware of how he fits into the bigger picture, and now it’s just a matter of time until the bigger picture starts to recognize him.

Read our full interview with Joe Iconis here.

Read our review of “The Black Suits” here.

Reach our Theater Editor Katie here, or follow her on Twitter here.

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