TOC: Why did you decide to do this at the Bailiwick?
Dennis DeYoung: I went to the Bailiwick because [artistic director] David [Zak] was going to offer me the opportunity to get the thing right.

TOC: How do you get it right?
Dennis DeYoung: How the hell do I know? You don’t know what a musical is until it’s moving in real-time in front of your eyes. But my sense is, it isn’t going to suck all that much.

TOC: You can put that on all the posters.
Dennis DeYoung: “Dennis DeYoung’s new Hunchback of Notre Dame: ‘Thought it was gonna suck…it doesn’t.’ ” You’ve got to feel like you’re ready to do it because you can’t do one of these musicals haphazardly. The Broadway American musical is the most difficult form of entertainment in the world. It has every element of entertainment, and in real time.

TOC: How is that different from the average rock show?
Dennis DeYoung: Is there acting in a rock show? No.

TOC: I’d argue there is. What about Kilroy Was Here? It had costumes, lights, choreography.
Dennis DeYoung: Kilroy was a concert disguised as a theatrical piece. This is a real theatrical piece where the plot must be moved along and explained and embellished by character. And they have to sing songs, and those songs have to make sense, and they can’t seem like they’ve been dropped on the audience from Mars.

TOC: Were you exposed to musical theater growing up?
Dennis DeYoung: Absolutely not. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. I was exposed to the White Sox and “Do you want that beef dipped?”

TOC: Many people are familiar with the Disney version of the story. Did that factor into your work on this?
Dennis DeYoung: Victor Hugo wrote a tragedy with a capital T. I’ve adhered to that. There are no singing gargoyles in my show, if you’re asking. We’re going to try to keep this as grounded and as real and organic as we can—all the time knowing that it is a musical and it does exist in a parallel universe where people sing.

TOC: You wrote the book as well as the music and lyrics, right?
Dennis DeYoung: What a show-off hog.

TOC: Do you prefer working solo on a thing like this, as opposed to collaborating with other people?
Dennis DeYoung: Another book had been written with the aid of a well-known writer, who shall remain anonymous, but David preferred my original book. It really wasn’t some sort of egotistical contest with myself. I would have been happy to have somebody else’s name on there.

TOC: To share the blame if something goes wrong?
Dennis DeYoung: Not only that, but it would lend, perhaps, some credibility. You know, who am I to be writing the book to a musical? But I did. I looked at the Hugo thing and I put it together. For better or for worse.

TOC: Plenty of old-guard pop musicians have dabbled in musical theater or classical music. Is that about respectability?
Dennis DeYoung: I think after you have done something for a real long time you should be looking for new challenges. The new challenges are limited for songwriters. You can either write a song for some other artist, or you can throw your hat into the Broadway milieu and see what happens.

TOC: You once described the music of Styx as “melodic, symphonic, pretentious and pompous…”
Dennis DeYoung: Of course it is. It’s white people going crazy. I gotta apologize to a bunch of critics for not being Muddy Waters? I love Muddy Waters, but I ain’t Muddy Waters. I’ll let someone apologize for me when I’m dead. I listen to it some 30-odd years later, it still sounds okay to me. There’s some stuff I did back then where I go, “This is crap.” But I got a couple right.

DeYoung’s Hunchback is in previews, opening Monday 19.