John Hennessey Took An Edible On A Plane And Wrote A Musical About Women’s Empowerment

If you were to describe John Hennessey in short, you might say he’s a character. He’s perhaps best known as the man behind Hennessey Performance Engineering, a hypercar manufacturer based in the United States. But that doesn’t mean he can’t do other things, too!

The news comes to us via Texas Monthly. The national magazine of the Lone Star state took a visit to the Hennessy shop, and naturally enjoyed a ride in the powerful Hennessey Venom F5. The outlet referred to this as the “world’s fastest car,” which is sure to draw some contention from multiple sources—the vehicle’s 1,817 horsepower notwithstanding.

But it was altogether something else that caught our eye in this story. Apparently, Hennessey has sampled some of the greenery our bountiful Earth has on offer, and that pushed him to write a musical. Yes, I genuinely woke up today, and that’s the story I was tasked to write, so here I am doing it. It’s a fun and weird business, this one, so let’s dive in!

Hennessey’s Venom F5 has been on a long journey to top 300 miles per hour. 

You What?

The Texas Monthly story is a wide-ranging exploration of John Hennessey’s life as a businessman in the motoring industry. While he started out working in asbestos abatement, the article chronicles how he came to turn his hand to cars, first making a big name for himself by tuning the Dodge Viper. From there, he eventually branched out into developing his own vehicles, before he famously tried to best Bugatti at the top speed game in the 2010s. That quest continues today, but as it turns out, it’s not the only creative pursuit that has drawn Hennessey’s attention.

Indeed, the article tells us that he once “took a gummy bear” on a flight from Los Angeles. We can draw conclusions as to what type of gummy bear this was—it’s perhaps implied that it was special but we won’t make any specific assumptions here. In any case, he was duly inspired to stay up all night to pen “a Broadway-style musical about ’empowering women and eighties-type music.'” Why haven’t we heard of this before? Well, sadly for us and the world of musical theatre, the piece never got made. “I’m told these productions are a total money pit,” Hennessey explained to Texas Monthly, with the magazine noting he was holding the idea for the future.

As much ink has been spilled on Hennessey’s motoring exploits, we’ve heard precious little about his theatrical aspirations. To that end, we needed to know more, and thus The Autopian reached out to Hennessey directly on Sunday evening. What he told us was tantalizing, but not enough to get our hopes up. “Maybe the musical is something I’ll do if I ever retire from [the] automotive industry,” he says. “[I] prefer not to share details.”

Right there, that’s John Hennessey openly stating that yes, he really did write a whole musical after an intense experience with a gummy bear. As is so often the case with artists, he doesn’t want to get into specifics on what is surely a personal work in the early stages of construction. While it’s entirely possible to write a musical in one night, actually turning it into a full production generally involves multiple passes of rewrites, especially when going through the casting process. It would be unfair of us to expect Hennessey to divulge critical details around setting, story, and themes given that it’s a work he’s hoping to potentially return to in future.

That’s not to say we can’t speculate as to what it might involve. Given Hennessey’s penchant for going all-out in the car scene with immense power and speed, one imagines he’d take a similar approach to musical theatre. One can imagine a big production involving a huge cast, big showpiece dance numbers, and probably some high-dollar licensed music, to boot. Would Hennessey go the jukebox route, securing rights to tracks like Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer or Kim Wilde’s You Keep Me Hangin’ On? Or are we talking a more bespoke piece with handcrafted lyrics to fit the ebb and flow of the story?

What could be more empowering than this?

As for the story itself, all we know is that it’s about “empowering women”—that’s a wide space to play in. One suspects, though, that Hennessey’s script would thus duly past the Bechdel test.

In any case, theatre is big business, particularly if you’re hoping to land on Broadway. He’d need a solid team behind him to pull off a viable production, and would ideally team up with those already experienced in the industry to have the greatest hope of success. While Hennessey has done well to keep his automotive business humming for 33 years, he’s faced some controversy about his company’s conduct along the way. One wouldn’t want to see that happen to his first nascent theatrical effort.

Indeed, 2016 saw our own Jason Torchinsky run a wild story on Hennessey Performance Engineering  (HPE) over at Jalopnik. Customers alleged that cars weren’t being delivered after payment, while ex-employees raised issues around the misuse of company funds. The most egregious accusations concerned the company using one customer’s funds to pay for the completion of another’s car, holding out on refunds, and simply failing to deliver finished vehicles, particularly for foreign buyers. Hennessey himself conceded “management issues” had affected the company, though offered little more to address the concerns raised in the piece.

Which is more challenging—building a world-beating hypercar, or getting your first show on Broadway?

Those concerns could hurt Hennessey’s efforts to find partners with which to produce his debut musical. That would be a shame, but still. He does have a successful business behind him, and could potentially bankroll his way around these problems. In show business, as in life—money talks.

We’re not expecting updates on Hennessey’s musical any time soon, given he’s stated it’s a post-retirement project for him, if it goes any further at all. But if it does happen? You know you’re going to hear more at The Autopian. More when we have it.

Image credits: Budman, Hennessey Performance via YouTube screenshot