A Hip Hop Play?

by Patrick Blake | Jan 29, 2020 | Blog

Setting the Scene

Usually I don’t talk about a show unless we are doing it, or planning on doing it. This week I’m going to make an exception. I want to talk about the current Broadway production of To Kill a Mockingbird.

I’m not going to talk about how it’s different from the book or the movie, or how the two adaptations are different from each other. I’m not going to complain about how only two of the characters are black, or that none of them are Reverend Sykes, which is too bad – he has the best line in the book and the movie. (It’s the moment just after the verdict has come in, and Tom Robinson has been found guilty of a crime that everyone, including the jury, knows he didn’t commit. Atticus is making the long lonely walk out of the courtroom. Scout is in the balcony reserved for blacks. She feels a tap on her shoulder. She turns around and she sees that everyone is standing in respect. Reverend Sykes says, “Miss Jean-Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”)

This is a Hip Hop Play?

What I want to talk about is why it’s a hip hop play.

KRS-One once famously said, “Rap is something you do. Hip Hop is something you live.”

What is lived in the play is a man sentenced for a crime he’s physically, demonstrably incapable of committing, just because he’s black. This kind of story is seldom seen onstage. But it, and other experiences like it, are what gave rise to hip hop.

Hip hop is a response to experienced injustice. Telling this story is what makes To Kill A Mockingbird a hip hop play.

Casting Who Tells Your Story

by Patrick Blake | Jan 22, 2020 | Blog

Non-Traditional Casting

Rhymes Over Beats has always been dedicated to non-traditional casting, and doing all we can to encourage it.

A few months ago I saw a news article that said Julia Roberts was once being considered to play the role of Harriet Tubman.

What?

Now I may have touched on this issue before, but the fact that someone would seriously think that Julia Roberts should be cast as Harriet Tubman warrants a repeat.

Let me say it again: It is bad when white actors are usually cast when the race of the character is not specified.

It is worse when the work is an adaptation, and a black fictional character becomes white in the film or the play.

It is the worst when someone white is considered to play a historical black individual.

I believe that the casting scales need to be balanced. Don’t you?

Achieving Balance

Balancing the scales does not mean putting items of equal weight on both sides of scales that are already out of balance. We need to go beyond that. Hamilton is a good example of how to start.

As hip hop theater artists, we are committed to considering casting black actors first where the race of the character is unspecified.

When Rhymes Over Beats chooses to adapt a work, we will never change the race of a character from black to white for any reason. We would never cast Brad Pitt as a Tuskegee Airman, no matter how excellent an actor Pitt is or how many seats he would sell.

Our intention is to go out of our way to balance the scale by choosing scripts where the majority of the characters are not white. We encourage other companies to do the same. Part of our mission has always been to increase the number of roles for a diverse pool of actors, in order to win awards and to increase visibility,

I, too, have a dream. Happy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Something New

by Patrick Blake | Jan 13, 2020 | Blog

A Good Comeback?

One of the most common human situations is the, “I wish I had thought to say…” situation.

Has that ever happened to you? Someone says something that is wrong, or ignorant, or just mean. A crushing comeback is called for. When we should be at our most eloquent, we are often at our most incoherent.

At the moment we are stunned. We can’t even make sense of what we are saying – or the best we can come up with is some lame playground riposte, that is childish enough to make Pee Wee Herman proud. Or worst of all, we are totally tongue tied. We stand there like freshly-caught fish, opening and closing our mouths with nothing coming out.

Only later do we think, “ I wish I had thought to say…”.

To the Rescue

Finally, someone is doing something to help. And of course, it is someone with one foot in the hip hop community and one foot in the theater community.

The Freestyle Love Supreme Academy was created to help everyone learn to freestyle., so that no one ever needs to be at a loss for words ever again.

I heard about this and thought it was a great idea. Some of our collective members have enrolled in the Freestyle Love Supreme Academy’s Foundations of Freestyle class. So, beginning this week and running for the next eight weeks, some of us will be adding to our skill set.

Everyone is excited! We’ll have a report on how things went in a future blog.

Everybody needs a better comeback. 😉

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Thanks for Your Support

Our New Year Resolutions

by Patrick Blake | Jan 7, 2020 | Blog

Here’s to a Fresh Start

Happy New Year! For the first blog of the new year, I thought I would talk about resolutions.

Resolutions are those things that you need to do to accomplish your goal(s). As a hip hop theater collective, our goal is to create and produce work that represents and celebrates the hip hop aesthetic.

In order to do this we need to do three things.

First we need to create a legal structure. This we have done.
Second we need to make potential collective members and potential audience members aware of our existence. This was our focus last year. We have a web site with a blog that is published once a week. We have Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts that are updated on a daily basis.
And third, we need to do the work, and create the product.

So for this year, our main resolution for Rhymes Over Beats is to generate more product.

We Need New Stories

In addition to the things we have done (and will continue to do), like looking for plays with a production history that fits our mission to co-produce, growing our Resident Artist Program (RAP), and working with existing members to develop work, this year we are introducing a new program.

Similar to how A Chorus Line was created, we are instituting a new way of creating an ensemble hip hop play/musical called the ACE program. The ACE program – or Artists’ Collaborative Ensemble – will be an ensemble of collective members working together to tell stories using a hip hop aesthetic. Email me if you’re interested in joining this select group for 2020.

But the truth is, we can’t do any of these projects, new or old, without you. Write more plays. Send them to us.

Join us in making hip hop theater the dominate form of theater.

We resolve this year will be our best year ever.

Diversity of Music

by Patrick Blake | Dec 17, 2019 | Blog

Diversity in Expression

This blog is about diversity. Our company, Rhymes Over Beats Theater Collective, is dedicated to diversity.

My more recent blogs have talked about the importance of having a diverse cast, about the necessity of having a diverse team back stage or in the front office, and in the diversity of creative expression in our work on stage.’

I also believe in diversity as a structural element of a musical.

A Musical Demands Diversity of Score

One of the few criticisms of the musical Hamilton that I’ve often heard is that it is not a “hip hop musical” because some of the music is [Spoiler Alert] sung.

If anyone is interested in a long response to this criticism, read Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter’s book Hamilton: The Revolution. It is a master class in how to write a musical.

The short response is that too much of a good thing is NOT a good thing.

Imagine a record album of nothing but ballads. Or how about a roller coaster with no dips, just a flat track from one end of the ride to the other? None of these are fun. They are not fun because there is no diversity. Nothing changes. No fast songs to get the blood moving, no straight down plummets and no scary loop de loops.

An all rap musical? It might be done, and it might even work. But it would be very difficult to pull off.

Better to write a musical with diverse kinds of music – like Hamilton.

In Hamilton: The Revolution, the great Stephen Sondheim warned Miranda of the lack of diversity in music in musicals. “Musicals depend on variety. Like republics, they need a multiplicity of voices to thrive,” the authors conclude in the book.

Happy Holidays from Rhymes Over Beats

This is the last blog of the year. I’m spending the next couple of weeks reflecting on the last year and planning for the new one.

Have a wonderful holiday and a great new year. Thank you for reading these blogs.

Hope y’all enjoyed the ride! Catch ya on the flip side.

“The only caution I can raise is the monotony of rhythmic and verbal attack over the evening – and, occasionally, over the song.”
– STEVEN SONDHEIM

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