by Patrick Blake

Imagine….

Imagine that we had a time machine and could go into the future forty years from now. (About how long Hip Hop music has been around.)

What would the world of theater look like if what we DO what we want to do?

There will be changes in the kinds of shows that are done. In the people who come to them, and in the people who put them on.

Please forgive the focus on Broadway but, sadly, and just for now, that’s where the money and fame is.

Musicals

There are, give or take, forty theaters on Broadway. At this moment, nineteen have musicals in them. One is a hip hop musical. Two others, non hip hop musicals, have majority minority casts.

If what we are trying to make happen does, then ten will have hip hop musicals (counting Hamilton which should still be running). Twelve will have majority minority casts.

Plays

Almost ever year there is one new play that is about the minority community. This year’s play is Latin History for Morons. Some years it’s a revival of one of August Wilson’s plays (the ones that are done on Broadway, not Off-Broadway).

Forty years from now, we anticipate that at least half of the plays on Broadway will have been written by the new August Wilsons.

This will happen because of the changes WE are making to who decides what plays are being done – and by doing that, changing who is in the audience.

Audience

New York City is one third white, but the Broadway audience is seventy seven percent white. Partly this is due to to the fact that it is sixty three percent tourist. In the future, both numbers will be different.

The reason that there are so few locals is that people who live in NYC have gotten out of the habit of going to the theater.

This is not because of prices. I’ve paid much more for a concert at MSG than I ever paid for Broadway show. Rather, two generations of New Yorkers raised on the music of Blondie and Tupac are not connecting with Andrew Loyd Webber. Hip hop theater will change that.

In 2057, only half the audience will be white. Because fifty percent will be local.

Making Theater Happen

Theater is done by the combined, collaborative efforts of many theater artists, technicians and craftspeople. These people learn by doing.

Sometime it’s because they apprentice with a union, sometime because they go to work at an office where the work being done is the kind they want to learn. Sometimes it’s a training program. Regardless of how it happens, the result is a lack of adequate representation of non-white participants.

Rhymes Over Beats’ mission is to create and produce hip hop theater. To fulfill our mission we will need hip hop artists, theater artists, technicians and craftspeople. This will over time change  – because of us.

In the future, the ideal should mirror the population. One third of of NYC is white, so one third of of the general managers, theater marketers, public relations execs, actors, directors, playwrights should be white, instead of the eighty percent it is now. I don’t think that this will happen by 2057, but fifty percent is reasonable.

Now You Know Us

If you read this and the other three blogs, you know why we are doing this, what we are doing to change theater, and how we are going to do it.

Future blogs will be about specific issues. Theater issues. Hip hop issues.

Yes, you can help!

Ask yourself if this is what you want. I hope so. We want to change things one person at a time.

We need you. We need your ideas. Your ideas on how to make the change happen. Right now, theater is by wealthy people for wealthy people.

We don’t have to wait for 2057 to change this. We can start now. We can make Theater for the community funded by the community. Now.

Join us. Donate.