Paul Iacono Tells Sandra Bernhard How He Turned Batman Into a High-Camp Opera

As the actor, writer, and director Paul Iacono sees it, superhero movies have always been sort of gay. “I mean, the spandex, the tights, the bondage, all the S&M,” he says. “Some of this stuff is low-hanging fruit.” If you don’t need to look terribly far to find the queer subtext in Batman, for example, Iacono and his collaborators—including co-writer Mark Kudisch and director Rachel Klein—have spelled it out in Gotham Rogues: The Unauthorized Batman Parody Musical, their new comic-book opera set to premiere at Joe’s Pub on October 27th. This time, he’s chosen to home in on the villains of Gotham, reinventing outlaws like Harley Quinn, The Riddler, and Two-Face as fully flesh-out surrogates for some of today’s most pressing societal ills. Joining Iacono at Joe’s Pub this winter is comedian and New York legend Sandra Bernhard, who’ll bring her one-woman act Caught Off Guard downtown for 11 performances in December. As they put the finishing touches on their respective shows, the longtime friends got together earlier this month to talk about anti-heroes, subverting expectation, and Iacono’s fateful childhood encounter with Rosie O’Donnell.

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SANDRA BERNHARD: Hi, Paul.

PAUL IACONO: Hi. How are you?

BERNHARD: I’m good, good as one can be in the present state of the country. I mean, if you’re a thinking, feeling, caring person, there’s at least two or three junctures throughout the day where you just sort of stop in your tracks and go, “Where’s the humanity?” So I always like to lead with that at this point, because to not do that is to be disengaged, just a blank human being. But all that said, I’m great, I’m creative, I feel inspired. I’m working on material for Joe’s [Pub] and just so happy that I personally get to have a wonderful life. I don’t understand why more people don’t want that for themselves.

IACONO: Yeah. I mean, to not see the atrocities and the horrific things that are happening to American citizens and non-citizens all over the world, you’d have to be pretty blind or actively ignorant.

BERNHARD: I think a lot of people are self-loathing, and when you feel insecure, when you feel self-loathing, you’re going to find what you consider to be a lesser creature to abuse. And I think that a lot of Americans look at the immigrants and people that are here under dire circumstances as less than them, so they mock them and laugh at them, and god forbid, send them back into terrible, dangerous situations. What a sad thing for people to feel that way. We can move on from that.

IACONO: Well, one more thing, since we’re on it. But today, it’s immigrants, right? That’s who ICE is targeting in this dehumanizing, brutal, repugnant way. And yet it could be us next. I’m not a preacher. I’m not trying to propagate or anything like that through the two new shows that I’m working on. But I don’t think you can really be a writer in today’s world without tuning into that and having some type of response, which is what we’re doing with our show at Joe’s Pub [Gotham Rogues: The Unauthorized Batman Parody Musical]. There’s a lot of sociopolitical satire and comedy that we’re very proud of that we think gives it a very relevant edge.

BERNHARD: And you’re working with another artist?

IACONO: Yeah, I’m working with a few great artists, but my core collaborator, his name is Mark Kudisch. He’s been on Broadway many times, Tony nominee. I grew up loving him in musicals like Michael John LaChiusa’s The Wild Party. And Assassins, which is one of my all-time favorite musicals. And the short version of the story is I reached out to him about a year-and-a-half ago when we had a one-act version of this musical and we were putting it up on its feet for the first time at Club Cumming. And I sent his agent an email and offered it to him. He came to the first rehearsal, walked in the door, and he’s just this ball of intellect and intensity. And he walked in the door and was like, “You don’t know this about me, but I’m a huge Batman fan too. And what you wrote, it’s really fucking good. And we could even make it better. We can turn it into a full, two-act musical. You could do this, and you could do that.” And I should mention our brilliant director, Rachel Klein, who is also the director of my Warhol factory play [High Priest: Confessions From the Warhol Factory]. Actually, all three of us are Virgos, Mark, Rachel, and I.

BERNHARD: A lot of honing in.

IACONO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was going to make an anal joke. Very anal-retentive, you know? [Laughs]

BERNHARD: [Laughs] Love that. So it took you a year to put this together?

IACONO: A year-and-a-half. To give you a little bit more background, my first love was music and my second love was Batman. [Laughs] I grew up on Batman: The Animated Series, which is considered to be one of the greatest animated series of all time. That’s not hyperbole. And also the 1966 Adam West Batman show.

BERNHARD: That was my favorite show when I was little.

IACONO: Those two shows deeply influenced my artistic—

BERNHARD: They had the best, from Eartha Kitt to Caesar Romero.

IACONO: Burgess Meredith.

BERNHARD: Vincent Price, Otto Preminger.

IACONO: Roddy McDowall.

BERNHARD: Oh my god. Just the best.

IACONO: It was insane.

BERNHARD: It was really a stroke of genius, that show.

IACONO: Something that people don’t talk about that show is that the producers of that show went out of their way to bring in a lot of queer or gay actors, even though they were not openly so. But they were really leaning into the obvious camp of it all.

BERNHARD: I wonder if the producers were gay.

IACONO: I don’t think they were, but I think they knew what they had. So anyway, Batman was a big love for me, and particularly the villains, or as we call them, the “rogues.” Because we see them a little bit more as three-dimensional sort of anti-heroes, these deeply flawed but oddly relatable people. And I’d always thought that a Batman musical, if done correctly, could be really cool, especially if it focused on the Rogues. But we’ve completely done our own thing with it. 

BERNHARD: Wait, who do you play?

IACONO: Oh, I’m the Riddler.

BERNHARD: That’s perfect for you. Frank Gorshin was the Riddler.

IACONO: Frank Gorshin, who I was lucky enough to meet at a comic convention years ago. I have a signed photo of him hanging up on my wall.

BERNHARD: Let’s just jump around for a minute. I didn’t realize that you had started off as such a young kid, pursuing entertainment and acting and performing. And also, I had no idea that you had gone through a very, very serious cancer scare when you were eight years old. Maybe it’s not something you want to talk about all the time, but I think it’s quite a jumping off place for somebody who’s creative—to be so young, to be such a sweet little creature, and having gone through that. So talk to me for a minute about that and how it informs your life and your work.

IACONO: Well, I think when you face mortality at a very young age, you realize that life is very short. And I’m a passionate person. I was born that way. And it just made me realize that whatever I wanted to do in life—for me, that was performing, and then as I got a little bit older, writing and creating work as well—I realized that you have to pursue your dreams with all your fervor and passion and intensity. I would not be the person that I am today if I hadn’t had to go through such a horrible thing at such a young age. 

BERNHARD: Diving more into your backstory, I didn’t realize you’d been on Rosie O’Donnell’s show numerous times. What would you do on her show?

IACONO: A little bit of backstory: when I was three, I began impersonating Frank Sinatra because my parents are from Jersey. So, naturally, Sinatra was playing in the house and in the car 24/7. And one day, as the legend goes, they were driving  down the shore or something and they turned off the CD, “Summer Wind” was playing. And from the back of the car came a little raspy voice who continued the lyrics in perfect pitch. And anyway, that was my shtick from a young age. Then it went from Sinatra to Ethel Merman. I saw Ethel Merman on The Muppet Show when I was a kid singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and I thought it was the height of sophistication and the height of theatricality.

BERNHARD: I think you’re right about that.

IACONO: [Laughs] So my parents, they were in denial about how gay their little son was, but they were smart enough to get me in front of Rosie. They got tickets to the show, and she ran three hours late to a taping of her own talk show because she was out to lunch with Madonna, as you do. And the warmup guy ran out of material after. “Does anyone in the audience have any material?” And my father gave me the push. I start belting out Sinatra and Merman. And an hour or so later, once the taping began, she called me up, had me do my shtick, and we kind of fell in love. And then a month later, I was diagnosed with leukemia and she became a huge champion of mine. And then she would just have me on to promote me doing Mame at the Papermill Playhouse with Christine Ebersole, or she would have me come on and deliver my Oscar’s prediction. Again, I’m eight, nine years old. I can remember the year that Fargo was up against Jerry Maguire, and her pick was Jerry, my pick was Fargo. And I think we know how that worked out…

BERNHARD: How did it work out?

IACONO: Fargo won.

BERNHARD: Oh, good. I’m glad to hear that. So tell me more about the Batman show.

IACONO: Well, it’s funny, what started as a parody really grew into something emotionally grounded. And while it’s still legally a parody, my co-writer and I have worked to humanize the Batman rogues and subvert expectations. So Poison Ivy isn’t just an ecoterrorist, but she embodies environmental activism and its personal cost. Two-Face becomes a mirror for a fractured judicial system. Penguin channels corrupt political ambition. And my role, the Riddler, reflects the rise of viral fame-driven influencer-style villainy. So a lot of these layers help to push the piece way beyond spoof and more into a funhouse mirror of our own world.

BERNHARD: Wow. That’s a big project. Did you watch the HBO [The] Penguin series that was on last year?

IACONO: I thought it was brilliant. Cristin Milioti, amazing. I’m so glad she won that Emmy. She absolutely deserved it. And that’s the great thing about Batman, there’s so many versions, right? We’ve already covered Adam West and the ’66 show, but then you’ve got the Joel Schumacher films, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, which were the more campy ones. Obviously, they were pretty queer—

BERNHARD: There was always sort of a gay element to Batman and Robin anyway.

IACONO: Oh, yeah. We definitely explore their complicated relationship. There’s so much queer-coded context to the whole superhero thing. I mean, the spandex, the tights, the bondage, all the S&M. The heroes are always tied up, whips and chains. Some of this stuff is low-hanging fruit. But we’ve just really sharpened that and made a delicious, spectacular musical out of it.

BERNHARD: Now, are you doing this in Joe’s Pub or at The Public Theater?

IACONO: We’re doing it at Joe’s Pub. We presented Act One on its own in the summer of 2024. And then in December of last year, we presented Act Two just by itself, both at Club Cumming, which we love. But this is the first time we have put the full thing together and we’ve also done a lot of rewriting. Joe’s Pub is sort of our coming-out party.

BERNHARD: I’m excited for you and just so impressed by how you jump from one interesting lily pad to the next. 

IACONO: Thank you very much. We’re very optimistic about it all. Hopefully, we see you on the 27th.

BERNHARD: I’d love to see it. I’ll keep you in the loop.

IACONO: Thanks, Sandra.

BERNHARD: Okay, sweetie. Thanks, everybody.