Plato’s Republic?

Plato’s Republic?

by | Dec 21, 2021 | Blog

To Post or Not To Post

 

Last week I went to a political fundraiser. Of course, I had the obligatory photos with the candidate taken and posted them.

I thought long and hard about doing this (not about going, but about showing publicly that I went on social media).  It was, after all, not the opening of a friend’s show where people would wonder if I didn’t go. It was political, not theatrical.

 

Integrity is Key

 

I worry about discouraging potential audience members by publicly supporting a candidate they might not. I know that I would not be comfortable to be seen to publicly supporting a work whose politics seem to me to be questionable. It seemed that I should keep my politics separate from my theater.

Upon reflection though, I’ve come to realize they are the same thing.

I don’t think it is possible to separate politics from theater. Theater is political. Plato famously banned playwrights (he called them poets) from his utopia. He thought that theater used the power of emotion combined with the power of the intellect to change people’s minds. This made theater dangerous. He thought individuals’ minds should be changed by the power of the intellect alone.

Plato’s approach makes for pretty boring theater.

The theatre Rhymes Over Beats produces is theater that is concerned with social justice.

We do political work. As long as our personal politics match that of the shows we produce, we will have no issues.

Do you agree?

 

 

 

The Passing of a Master

The Passing of a Master

by | Dec 9, 2021 | Blog

RIP Stephen Sondheim

 

Because Rhymes Over Beats is a theater company, before another day goes by we must add our voice to the chorus of praise for the life and work of Stephen Sondheim. His passing leaves a void nearly impossible to fill.

And because we are a hip hop theater company, we especially want to praise his use of various rhyme schemes.

 

Use of Rhyme in Musical Songs

 

In his work Sondheim has used every possible way of constructing a rhyme. There is one song, however, that I think is exceptional – and strangely enough, it is NOT one from his many theatrical works.

It is “I Never Do Anything Twice,” a song composed for the 1976 film The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. On YouTube there are multiple versions of the song. I would encourage everyone to listen to it.

You’ll find that the song has three verses and one chorus. In the verses he rhymes the end word in every other line. In the chorus, he rhymes the end word three lines in a row. In one chorus he uses the same word as a rhyme with itself, playing with the different meanings of the word (“habit”  as an article of clothing and as a repetitive behavior).

This kind of virtuoso writing of rhymes is something we writers should all aspire to do.

Now, sadly, there is one less person to do it.

#RIP Mr. Sondheim.

 

 

 

Our Stories Become Our Culture

Our Stories Become Our Culture

by | Nov 30, 2021 | Blog

What Stories Do You Tell?

 

The tag line of the original production of the musical HAMILTON was, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”

I was reminded of this as we enter a major holiday period. Which holidays that you celebrate tell your story?

This is why there are Thanksgiving decorations all over the place, and the day itself is a national holiday. This is a function of numerical superiority: the more people there are to tell the story, the more entrenched in the culture the story becomes.

 

Let’s Share More Diverse Stories

 

In the United States this means that Thanksgiving is celebrated with Pilgrims having a higher pride of place than indigenous peoples. It means that Christmas is celebrated rather than Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or the Winter Solstice – and our New Year begins on January first, not in February.(like Chinese New Year).

This will continue to happen unless some of us who are in the majority insist that other people’s stories be told alongside our own.

The reason Rhymes Over Beats exists is to help tell the stories for communities that do not have a numerical superiority in the culture.

We are here to help tell those stories.

Please join with us. Bring us your stories, and on #GivingTuesday (or any day) support our work whenever and however you can

Music Doesn’t Live in Silos

Music Doesn’t Live in Silos

by | Nov 24, 2021 | Blog

Why Hip Hop Music in Theater?

 

I am often asked, “Why use hip hop music in theater? What is wrong with the music written by the wonderful composers in years gone by? Take composers like Richard Rodgers or Frederick Loewe, for instance. Why can’t hip hop writers write like them?”

My response has been to point out that a similar question could be posed to someone like Jerome Kern. Why couldn’t he write more like Rudolph Friml?

 

 

You Do You

 

Now, thanks to an interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda just published in The Hollywood Reporter for November 16, 2021, I have an even better response.

Miranda, now directing a film of Jonathan Larson’s called  tick, tick…BOOM had this to say:

“The thing that Jonathan Larson did very consciously as a songwriter — which I picked up and continue to do — was not to segregate his musical theater tastes from his music tastes…He really wanted to thread the needle of a satisfying evening at the theater that you wouldn’t be ashamed to pump out of your car radio. I was very conscious of doing that when I started writing musical theater, too, because I thought he was right — particularly in terms of the hip-hop and Latin music and music I grew up listening to. I don’t believe music lives in a silo. We silo things to make sense of them, but music transcends all of that.”

Hip hop artists write musicals using hip hop music because they do not believe “music lives in a silo.”

Don’t you agree?

Hip Hop Theater Artists

Hip Hop Theater Artists

by | Nov 16, 2021 | Blog

We Are Hip Hop Theater 

 

Rhymes Over Beats is about hip hop theater. We are one of the few theater companies or individuals who have this focus.

On the hip hop side, most hip hop artists don’t know about or care about theater. But every day I see more and more people being interested in who we are and what we do.

On the theater side, more theater artists care about hip hop than hip hop artists care about theater. That number is growing as younger artists take the place or older artists.

 

We Are Artists

 

Rhymes Over Beats encourages this trend. We want hip hop theater to become the dominate form of theater.

When we see an artist combining hip hop and theater, especially a person of influence and accomplishment, we want to do all we can to support and promote them. Such a person is Nicole Hodges Persley, an associate professor at the University of Kansas, who just put out a book called Sampling and Remixing Blackness in Hip Hop Theater and Performance. I’m not going to lie, this is an expensive, dense, academic text. But, if you want to learn more about hip hop theater, it is worth buying.

And if you do, please let her know that you bought the book because you heard about it on our website.

Spread the word!