Can Hip-Hop Save Broadway?

[DudeAsInCool]

Straight Outta Broadway

A quarter century on, hip-hop has barely cracked the theater. But it could be its salvation.

(Photo: Carol Rosegg/Coutresy of New York Theatre Workshop)

Hip-hop can save the theater; I am not kidding. At a time when playwriting has grown timid, the musical is irrelevant, and young audiences quite understandably stay away, along comes a highly theatrical form of music that happens to be the planet’s dominant youth culture. Someone looking for a way out of theater’s current mess could scarcely dream of a more direct route.

Of course, to say hip-hop can save the day doesn’t mean it will. Already it has been around for a quarter century and registered barely a flicker on the New York theatrical radar. Whether its potential will ever be realized depends a great deal on what’s going on right now at New York Theatre Workshop, where the playwright Will Power has written a hip-hop adaptation of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. The critical response so far has been favorable. Still, even the play’s champions appear not to realize the full extent of what hip-hop and theater can do.

http://newyorkmetro.com/arts/theater/reviews/16020/