IF fortune smiles on "Most Wanted," a musical about a fame-hungry serial killer who saves his last bullet for himself, the theater world may have on its hands another testament to the power of drag queens.
For nearly six years, off and on, three respected theater pros -- Mark Bennett, Jessica Hagedorn and Michael Greif -- have been grappling with its risky, unorthodox material. The template for "Most Wanted," which begins a two-week workshop production today at La Jolla Playhouse, is the life of Andrew Cunanan, an alluring, chameleonic party boy from the San Diego gay-bar scene. In 1997, he went on an unexplained, 2 1/2 -month cross-country killing spree, climaxing in his infamy-sealing trophy killing of fashion designer Gianni Versace.
The show's artistic aim, its creators say, is to use the Cunanan saga as a lens for examining America's celebrity culture, a society in which people whose only assets may be a sexy come-on and a willingness to parade misbehavior in public can become objects of mass fascination.
Bennett had the initial idea. He has long been an A-list theatrical sound designer, with such credits as Tom Stoppard's Tony-winning "The Coast of Utopia." But he dreamed of succeeding with a full-blown musical.
Cunanan popped into Bennett's shaven cranium as he sat in the almost-empty Mandell Weiss Forum, waiting out the tedious "tech week" process of rehearsing a show's nitty-gritty logistics.
"For a very long time," Bennett was thinking about why celebrity and fame have become an American pastime and preoccupation -- and how he might explore the question in a musical.
"I felt it was symptomatic of a bereftness in our individual lives, that we kept looking obsessively" at the parade of short-term attention-grabbers flitting by on "Entertainment Tonight." A story like Cunanan's "could sing in a certain way," Bennett was convinced. "The tricky part is finding out just what that way would be, finding a structure for the story, and the right people to work with and really explore it."
The three co-creators first worked together in 1998 on the La Jolla premiere of "Dogeaters," Hagedorn's stage adaptation of her own novel about social and political ferment in her native Philippines.
Their show has developed in spurts, when the trio, all based in New York City, were not attending to other business, including Greif's staging of "Grey Gardens" on Broadway, and Hagedorn's completion of two-thirds of a dramatic trilogy for the San Francisco theater company Campo Santo.
