Interview: Paul Iacono & Marc Kudisch on GOTHAM ROGUES Batman Parody Musical at Joe's Pub

Gotham Rogues: The Unauthorized Batman Parody Musical is a new show written by and starring Paul Iacono and Marc Kudisch, with additional material by Barrett Leddy. Rogues will be playing at Joe's Pub for one night only on Monday October 27. I had the chance to talk to Paul and Marc, who co-wrote the book and are starring as the Riddler and the Joker. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

So let's start with the easy one. Tell me about the show.

Paul Iacono: My first love was music, but my second love was Batman. The Adam West '66 series and Batman the Animated Series, specifically, were the tentpoles of my childhood. But obviously, the villains were my favorite. [T]hey helped shape my artistic identity from the time I was 3. The idea for Gotham Rogues began about five years ago with the merging of two obsessions. The first is musicalizing one episode of Batman The Animated Series, the classic episode "Almost Got 'Im", which we changed to "Almost Got 'Em", which was originally conceived as a one-act parody. And the other thing… I was combining that with my lifelong love of Batman The Animated Series' lush, noir-infused background music… I always thought some of those melodies are so beautiful and I'd love to write lyrics to them. So that combination, the storytelling in this score, was the alchemy that sparked the show. We staged that first version in the summer of 2024 with an extraordinary Broadway cast, most notably Marc Kudisch, who I admired since high school. [I was a] massive fan of Assassins and Wild Party. But we hadn't met before. So Marc joined as the Joker, and being as big a Batman fan as I am, immediately pushed us to expand it into a full two-act musical. So from there we immediately built act two… which is inspired by another of the great Batman animated series episodes called "The Trial". And over the past year and a half, we've refined it into something that now stands completely on its own. You know, it's a full blown comic book opera where Gotham's rogues finally get their day in court.

So Marc, you got involved when you were cast as The Joker?

Marc Kudisch: Yeah. Again, Paul and I didn't know each other, but I knew his work. I've always had an enormous affection for comic books. [I've been] a comic book geek since [I was] a kid. I have a comic book collection that is to be somewhat envied.

How big is your collection?

MK: I want to say I've got like 40 or 50 that I've really held on to over the years. Like I got "The Death of Superman" both in the big book and in the small mag. And I've got all the original Guy Gardners, like, the whole original first run of the series. And I've got "World of Krypton", and I've got old Supermans from the 50s. I've got the big book of "Superman versus Muhammad Ali". Outside of Superman, which, of course, we all loved, I just especially like the Batman because he's just a dude. One of the things that I kind of really dig about what Paul and I have worked on and written here is that none of them are meta [none of them have superpowers]. These superheroes are all just people in this piece. They may have really cool gadgets or they may be super scientists or whatnot, but they're all just people and they're very relatable because of that.

PI: You know, it's funny because [this show] started as a parody. Some people think parody equals silly or irreverent or but what started as a quote, unquote "parody" really grew into something emotionally grounded. And while it's still legally a parody, Marc and I have worked to humanize these characters and subvert expectations… turning the rogues into fully three-dimensional, oddly relatable antiheroes. And speaking of Assassins, the way that I sort of see [this show] is, it's Assassins set in Arkham Asylum. And just as that Sondheim classic reframes historical villains, we invite audiences to see Gotham's rogues in a more empathetic light.

Marc, you're involved with writing the book, is that right?

MK: Yes.

Is this your first time doing that?

MK: No.

What else have you written?

MK: I've co-written a new play about Mark Twain with my friend Dick Scanlan, who I've known forever. I've written a holiday show with my buddy Jeff Denman that we had produced at the York Theater Off-Broadway. I've written a piece called American Baritone about the history of the baritone voice, but in fact, it's really a history of America. I've written a lot of things, but a lot of the writing that I was doing was more like... it's interesting because just lately it's gone more into fictional writing.

Who's your favorite supervillain of all time?

PI: That's a great question. I love them all. They're so great.

You've got so many great ones in your show.

PI: It's hard to nail down one [but] I will. Okay? I know this is low-hanging fruit, but the Joker is special for me. He always has been. He does transcend comic book mythology. His character, it's the living metaphor of chaos and nihilism. [But] he's not insane, you know. Marc and I had this conversation. People think he's insane, but actually the Joker sees the world clearer than you or I, Brett. And that's what makes him so fascinating, is that he's able to cut through all of society's bullshit, and then throws it back in their face with a poison pie. You know what I mean?

MK: The Joker is the id running Wild. The Joker is how we would all like to be right in there. When you see the Joker, you're given permission to allow your id to go for a little minute. It's sort of like taking the dog to the dog park and letting him off leash. You go do whatever you want to do, because I know that you're fenced in, and I know that I can get the leash on you any time I want to. So there's a certain safety to the chaos that is about to ensue. That's what I think we love about the Joker. So everyone loves the Joker because there's a part of everyone that wants to sort of be the Joker and have that freedom for a moment.

PI: Oh, I've always loved the Riddler. I was the Riddler for Halloween. I was 7 or 8 years old the year that Jim Carrey played him in Batman Forever. Playing the Riddler has really brought him closer to me, you know? We have a lot of similarities. We're both obsessed with performance, solving puzzles. For me, it's more dramaturgical and musically and that sort of thing. And also, you know, his big thing is proving himself as one of Gotham's elite rogues. And I'll let you fill in the metaphor there, but it's certainly a role that I've been able to bring a lot of myself to work on. I don't know if you saw this in the press release, but we have Lorne Lester, the original Robin/Nightwing from Batman The Animated Series.

I did see that.

PI: We were lucky enough to get him to to join us. He's playing Penguin. It was a very surreal, full-circle dream, getting to work with my childhood hero. So it's just another joy of the piece and totally unexpected.

I should I should say, the other three core members of our creative team, our brilliant director, Rachel Klein, our music maestro, Peter Sax, who takes all these lush or symphonic or orchestral pieces and then turns them into Broadway style musical numbers. And then lastly, Barrett Leddy, who is also another co-writer, he provided additional material for the show. So between between the five of us, it's been a very special collaboration. We're not just artists who are working on a project together. We're actually very, very, very, nice people who are very f-ing cool. I mean, it's like a family. It's a family affair.

MK: Well, like, my ass is old, right? I've been doing this a really long time. And I can tell you, in my experience, that New York City is one of the greatest places in the world to present something. And it's one of the hardest, most challenging places in the world to develop and process something, because everyone is always looking for results, right? Everyone's always looking for some safe bet [and] it's really hard to develop in the city. That's why everybody wants to go out of town. But it's expensive to go out of town, and the days of those national tours that I used to do are no longer because of the costs of everything the way that they are. None of these characters are the characters that you know, and then you realize you don't know them at all, or you're you're seeing them with a fresh perspective, in a way that they've not been seen before. Paul's Riddler has not been done before. I guarantee it. And he's immediately fresh and new, and he's immediately recognizable. And the way that we treat all the characters, it's a whole different point of view. And it takes a really great group of people to be able to do that anywhere. That's a large part of the reason that we were down at Club Cumming twice, because this feels like a Lower East Side kind of show. We want it to feel that way. Unapologetically, we want it to be what it is, you know? And that's why Joe's Pub just seemed, at this point, like a great next step, because it's still down on the Lower East. We're still in a club [rather] than in a theater. We can remain out of the box with the work that we're doing.