Naked Lunch: The Musical at St. Bonaventure Church

Looking back on the Naked Lunch trials, which featured testimony from an assortment of colorful characters ranging from sheltered librarians and New England society matrons to "beat generation" writers like Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac, he saw a way to tell the story of this precedent-setting case through musical theater. In June of 2015, he and his musician friend and Yale classmate Damon Baker decided to collaborate on a musical comedy dramatizing and musicalizing the novel's initial obscenity trial in Boston Superior Court (a decision that was later reversed in favor of publication by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court). Baker's score and Hannay's lyrics set the testimony of the witnesses to an original score of 12 songs in musical genres ranging from 1950's jazz to Gilbert and Sullivan-like operetta and patter songs.