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.
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