We Want You

by Patrick Blake | Sep 17, 2019 | Blog

How Can We Connect?

I’ve been thinking about the Rhymes Over Beats platform. That is to say, our visibility – how our audience learns about us, how we connect with them, and how we can make it easier for them to connect with us.

How we go about creating a community of interest in hip hop theater, and what we could be doing better.

I know that when our Public Enemy documentary “When Reagan Killed Roosevelt” is released, when the play Sonny’s Song opens, and after the musical Masta Ace is writing with us is finished, we’ll be quite visible.

But what more can we do before then?

Right now we have a website plus our Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter pages, which are regularly updated. I write this blog weekly, and we’re developing a YouTube channel.

Is this enough? I’m not sure.

What Else?

What else should we be doing?

We are hoping because we are connected to you here, right now, that you could help us.

How did you find out about us?
Have you seen any of our productions?
Is the website easy to navigate?
Is there any information on the website that is missing?
Anything you wanted to know, but couldn’t find it?

Let us know. Shoot me an email at Patrickrobad@gmail.com.

Is there a social media site we should have a presence on, other than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube?
We regularly use the hashtags #hiphop #hiphoptheater #offbroadway and #blacktwitter. Are there other hashtags we should be using?

#Talk to Me.

We want to hear from you.

How can we make this easy for you?

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Grateful to Be in Theatre?

by Patrick Blake | Sep 9, 2019 | Blog

A Life in Theater

The inspiration for this blog came from a column in the San Francisco Chronicle by Lily Janiak, called “Theater workers, let’s reject ‘happy just to be here’”

There is an idea that people involved in theater should be grateful that that they are allowed to be involved in theater at all. That it is a privilege to be involved. So we work long hours for not much money, primarily in not for profit organizations.

The question is, why is this a prevailing belief?

You Can’t Make a Living, But…

The first answer is an old joke. “You can’t make a living in theater, but you can make a killing.”

If you have written a play, or have performed on Broadway to sell-out audiences, you have the potential of making three million a year. Three million a year! There are very few careers where this is a real possibility. Theatre is one.

Another reason for staying in theatre is that theatre offers psychic benefits lacking in most jobs. A life in the theater is never dull. And there is that chance for fame – to inspire and to have the admiration of total strangers.

Finally, there is the ability to make a difference. To make the world better, one person at a time.

How many times have you heard people say that a piece of theater changed their life?

Should You Be Grateful?

All these things are true. But are they enough to say that people in theater ought to feel grateful?

If you are rich, famous, and making the world a better place, then the answer is yes.

If you’re not? I can only say, ask me that question when I am. 🙂

A Place 4 Seeing New Work

by Patrick Blake | Sep 2, 2019 | Blog

What About the Actors?

As a hip hop theater collective, we want to create programs for all of our members.

Some we have already done. We’ve started the writer residency program RAP, which is designed for playwrights, beat makers and MCs.

We have done productions such as last years’ My Father’s Daughter by Ursula Rucker, and the upcoming Sonny’s Song by Germono Toussaint. These productions use the talents of our producers and directors.

What we don’t have at the moment is a program to use our actor members to develop new work.

Since we want to use the talents of ALL of our members, what we have in mind is something along the lines of A Chorus Line. However, instead of dancers talking about the difficulties they face, our show would be about the experience of being black and the modern struggles that face our community, possibly told within the context of another storytelling or historical genre.

A Theater is a Place of Seeing

From the earliest time, theatre has been about ways of seeing other perspectives differently. The very word ‘theater’ is derived from the Greek word theatron, meaning the “place of seeing” – where the audience sits to see the narrative unfold onstage.

An audience gathers to see stories of fallible human beings, much like themselves, try to work out their struggles and succeed. They want to see people triumph, to be inspired, to have their faith in humanity restored, to understand and experience different human stories and live vicariously through them. Audiences want to be changed, because they were able to live a different life for a brief hour and a half.

What would you like to show onstage? What issues do you face? Whatever story it is, it can be told onstage, and explored in the hands of talented actors.

Our actor ensemble will determine what the work will ultimately be.

Are you ready to get down and create?

Are You An Actor?

To do this we need your help. If you are an actor and want to participate, let us know asap.

Sometime in the next few months we will make an announcement about the details on our social media. We plan on getting a rehearsal room ready, stocking it with food and beverages, and just let happen what happens.

Hopefully we will come out of the room with something really exciting.

Sound interesting? If you’re an actor and want to be a part of this, hit us up.

Soon.

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Thanks for Your Support

The Seldom-Told Story

by Patrick Blake | Aug 26, 2019 | Blog

400 Years of Slavery

This month everyone’s focus should be on the year 1619.

Why 1619? That was the year that blacks were first brought to America as slaves.

Last week, August 20^th to be specific, was the four hundredth anniversary of race-based slavery in what would become the United States of America.

How do I know this?

The NY Times published a series of essays in the magazine section last Sunday called the 1619 Project.

Who Tells the Story?

I’ve rarely seen such an intemperate reaction. The criticism seems to be not so much that the story was inaccurate, or that inferences were being drawn that are invalid, but that the story was being told at all. How dare anyone tell a story contrary to the one “everyone” already knows.

Rhymes Over Beats is about telling the seldom told story. We are even more about telling stories that have never been told before. This seems to be that kind of story. Until I read the series of articles I didn’t know exactly when the first slaves came to America. Now I do. And I’d like to know more.

Because we are writers, actors, directors, producers we understand that when something happens there is no “one true version” of a story. No one way to tell it.

What the Times did was take a story that few knew and told it. The criticism seems to be that they shouldn’t have told it at all.

Your Story, Your Truth

The remedy for telling a story we don’t agree with is not the suppression of that story, but more stories told from a different point of view.

As a collective this is what we are about. We tell the seldom-told story.

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Highlights from Leschea Show

by Cate Cammarata | Aug 19, 2019 | Blog

Patrick on the Leschea Show

Last month Pat was interviewed on Leschea Show, an online radio show that won ‘Best Online Talk Show’ by Mixcloud.com in 2016. Leschea is a R&B performer who has a history of past success on her own and as a part of a hip hop crew formed by Masta Ace Incorporated, and has been part of the hip hop scene in Brooklyn for over 15 years. She is a fan of Rhymes Over Beats and a strong supporter for Hip Hop Theatre. We want to underline some of the points that were made that day on the show.

In this online episode, Leschea wanted to know Pat better and find out what made him interested in hip hop music in the first place. “I started liking the hip hop music at basketball games, and started to listen to it at home,” Pat said. “I’m a playwright, and I started working with a rapper named Chi-Ill on a musical based on unjust conviction.”

A Heart for Social Justice

Patrick Blake had found success as a producer for the Off-Broadway play The Exonerated, a play about six real people who were on death row. During its national tour, then-Governor Ryan of Illinois commuted the death sentence of everyone that had been on death row after seeing the show in Chicago.

Pat wanted to make sure that he created more theater that had a real impact. “By presenting a work of art that you can understand, you can see how things can happen the way they do,” he told Leschea. Issues facing the hip hop community in the criminal justice area like coerced confession and cross-racial identification are problematic, and by staging these issues in a theater we can make the first steps toward fixing them.

Freedom the Musical, the hip hop work that was written by Pat and Chi-Ill, was the first show that was developed by Rhymes Over Beats Theater Collective, the non-profit theater company formed by Blake to create new work. As he began to meet others in the hip hop industry to talk about his passion, he found more and more people that wanted to be part of the process. This is why the company is a “collective” instead of a typical theater company.

Are You On Board?

Raising money in the commercial theater is daunting – Pat estimates the cost to be between $3-5 million for an Off-Broadway show and $13-15 million for a Broadway show – so one of the things that Leschea was on board with was to help gain the support of the community to raise funds to produce the shows.

Currently in addition to Freedom the Musical, the Rhymes Over Beats Collective is also developing a play by a talented young writer Germono Toussaint and Masta Ace’s first musical.

Do you know someone in hip hop that would like to be part of our theater collective? Contact Pat Blake directly on social media. He’d love to talk to you.

‘Leschea Show which is the Online R

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The Producer’s In Charge

by Patrick Blake | Aug 12, 2019 | Blog

Let the Producer Produce

I think I’ve talked about this before, but it keeps happening so I’m going to talk about it some more. It is a major irritant.

Too many times my desire to produce a play or a musical has been crushed by the playwright insisting on something that

is none of their business, or
something that, if done, would guarantee that I lose my money and my investors money.

Playwrights own their plays, but they don’t own the production of their plays.

Playwrights Don’t Own Their Productions?

For a play to be done on Broadway, a producer needs to raise and spend millions of dollars. In order to do that they hire someone to handle the business side of the production – things like negotiating contracts, or setting up the payroll. This person is called a General Manager.

I once didn’t produce a play because a playwright insisted on a veto over my choice of general manager. Why? I didn’t ask, because who the general manager was was none of the playwright’s business. I just passed on the show.

The producer raises the money for the production, and steers the ship. Not the playwright – unless the playwright also wants to be the producer.

No producer can guarantee that a production won’t lose money. But they can take steps that reduce the risk. Some of these steps are quasi-artistic, like who the actors will be.

Now I believe that playwrights should have a voice in casting, but they should not have the final say. As the producer, if I think an “A” list movie star who will sell tons of tickets would be good in a role and the playwright thinks an unknown actor friend would be even better artistically, the playwright might be correct. But if they insist on their choice over my choice, the only person that they will need to find is another producer.

So Many Playwrights Miss Out

These are only two examples. I’ve got a books worth of them, and if I ever finish writing the book you’ll be able to hear about all of them.

Meanwhile, you have a producer who wants to do your show. That’s what matters.

Everything else? Let it go.

And keep the producer.

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Thanks for Your Support

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