I’m hesitant to suggest that I know just what Joe Iconis and Gregory Moss were up to when they wrote the book for this ambitious show about an ambitious guy. (The talented Iconis also handles the music and lyrics, and hits big with several, especially the prolonged Latino boast that is “Brown Buffalo.”) It’s a musical about the life and work of Hunter S. Thompson, a man whose personality was so much larger than life that it ultimately overshadowed his life’s work, a man who was so driven to righteously defend the unrighteous (or the freaks, as he is forever calling them here) that he was willing to lie to make his point — wait, I mean, insert himself into the story he was writing so thoroughly that the writer’s subjective experience took priority over the objective facts, a technique famously branded as gonzo journalism. Also, a guy whose seething hatred of President Nixon and heedless love of drugs kind of crashed his career not long after it took off. Frankly, a tough bit of Americana from which to fashion a hero, however obvious the appeal of a guy who is forever championing the outsider and the underdog.

And then…then they give us Nixon as nemesis, Nixon as heckler, Nixon as the villainous personification of squareness…and they make him fabulous. Gabriel Ebert’s Hunter is a great big magnetic presence, all limbs and voice and downed-power-line energy. But George Abud’s Nixon is the cocksure master of the universe, his crafty confidence providing his character with an unsettling charisma. When he sings “Dick Nixon’s gonna kick your ass!” you can’t help but know it’s true. He’s the real Bad Boy here, the establishment rebel against the counterculture that the Boomers turned into the status quo. Not for nothing do they send him roller skating across the stage in a star-spangled swimsuit. It feels positively subversive. And it’s hugely entertaining.

And THEN…they choose as their organizing thematic detail the fact that Hunter once spent a summer re-typing The Great Gatsby, because he wanted to know what it felt like to write such influential prose, only to finish with a tribute to that famous green light, the one that Fitzgerald teaches us we’ll never reach. As I say, I’m not totally sure what they were up to with this one, but I have my suspicions, and if I’m right, it’s daring as hell.