By Jake Buswick

Dante Bellicosa, Broadway's newest and most flamboyant bad boy, is no stranger to controversy. What makes Bellicosa unique is his fixation on the unlikely mating of science fiction and the rock opera. Bellicosa first came to popular acclaim during his tenure as head choreographer for the 1994 revival of Tommy. Within a year, he was helming his own projects, financed by private investors. In 1995, his Slan: The Musical was held over for twenty-eight weeks at its off-broadway venue. In 1997, he hit the big time with Dhalgren!, which consistently out-grossed Rent for more than a year on Broadway and featured guest appearances by Robert Smith, Afrika Bambattaa, Billy Idol, Gary Numan, and Tricky. In 1998, he collected the first of his three Tony Awards for Isaac Asimov's Foundation, and won another for its 1999 sequel, Rock the Foundation! His current project, Dante Bellicosa's Starship Troopers!,was nominated for seven Tonys but brought home only one. Still, it's touring coast to coast and shows no signs of slowing down. We caught up with Bellicosa by phone just after a midnight rehearsal. The Onion AV Club: So, you've actually moved out to Minneapolis from Boston? Dante Bellicosa: Well, not moved as in moved permanently, but I've set down some roots here to last for a year or two. O: Why Minneapolis? DB: Well, the decision wasn't entirely up to me... there were others to consider... but it's got a lot going for it. It's centralized. It'll be an easy place to run the Starship Troopers tour from. O: So, you pretty much invented this science fiction rock opera thing, didn't you? DB: Jesus fuck, how much research did you actually do? Jeff Wayne's musical War of the Worlds was out years ago. That was what kicked it off for me... that was my inspiration. I may have done heaps more of it than anyone else, but I certainly didn't invent it. O: Okay. DB: I don't mean to be harsh, son. It's just this Irish-Italian belligerence. I have an excess of it. Don't piss me off. O: Okay. I'll do my best. So, it's reported that you're not extremely popular among your fellow Broadway directors and playwrights. DB: Jesus. Like we're all card-carrying members of some club. Got a secret handshake, meet twice a month to have soup. Jesus, no, it's nowhere near as monolithic as that. But there is definitely a... tendency, a professional tendency, to sneer at what I do, and at what Jeff Wayne did. Because it dares to involve science fiction. The holier-than-thou dancing prig society is happy to fuck around with myth and legend, but oh, science fiction... that's so very popular, isn't it? Because it's a recent myth, created in the last century, rather than the myths handed down from the Greeks or Babylonians three thousand years ago, it's somehow unclean. O: Might there be some jealousy there, too? Of your success? DB: Oh, absolutely. You have no idea. Absolutely. My second greatest crime is that I put asses in seats and I do it consistently. The take on a Bellicosa production is a steady 20-30% above everything else, for the length of its run, and I don't even use huge coast-to-coast marketing campaigns. Billboards and shit like that. Fuck that. My works... are goddamn theater musicals, get it? I've got kick-ass music, perfect choreography, hot chicks, muscular studs, and great stories, and I've got it all going around on stage for three hours, like an orgasm in a kaleidoscope. People come back to see my shows five, six times because they want to. Not because it's the season's social event, but because it entertains the hell out of them. O: And some of your peers resent that? DB: Of course they do, because most of my peers are boring fucks. Let me level with you-- science fiction rock opera is only shit on by humorless, thin-skinned emotional lepers, which is pretty much every big director but me. This is a medium... that is so wide-open and flexible and colorful, and most of its big names are bean-counters, has-beens, and glorified lighting managers. There is so little innovation, so little that is new under the sun, in fact I think I have accounted for every major new musical in the past five years. Other than me, it's all revivals, revivals, revivals... seriously, give it five years and they'll revive Rent. They spice up the stage effects, but it's the same old shit over and over again. My Fair Lady is still boring old shit even if everyone in the cast has a pierced clitoris. Give me a fucking break... these are community theater productions with million-dollar budgets. It might look like progress, but it ain't. How about a gay Vietnamese version of A Christmas Carol? Wheeee! That's innovation, baby! Give me a fucking break. O: Not a culture that welcomes innovation, then? DB: Not on your fucking life. You think the suits were happy with Julie Taymor when she did her version of The Lion King, the highly stylized one, no fucking muppets? Jesus! She had to give bone marrow and urine samples just to convince those fucks! They were looking for a stage version of that Disney on Ice crap. If she'd been one hair less stubborn, they'd've spray-painted a Barney the Dinosaur costume yellow and stuck a fucking mane on it. There's your lion king, pal. There's your fucking flexibility. Anyone who wants to be flexible in this business needs to be stubborn as hell, or independently financed. Like me. O: So what's next for you? DB: Well, eight more months of Starship Troopers!, and then I can start laying the groundwork for my new play. This one is not a musical... I'm taking a short break from that. A little pause before I come back bigger and badder than ever. This next one will be fairly minimalist. O: I understand it has something to do with Tolkien? DB: That's right. It's an examination of the events of The Lord of the Rings through the eyes of two of its minor participants. It's called Farmer Maggot and Barliman Butterbur are Dead. I've already got Tim Roth and Matthew Broderick signed for at least a year of touring. It's going to be fucking fantastic.