‘Freestyle Love Supreme’ Review: Hip-Hop Saves the World

‘Freestyle Love Supreme’ Review: Hip-Hop Saves the World

10/03/2019

And just as you were thinking that life has no rhyme nor reason these days, along comes “Freestyle Love Supreme” to pump you full of hope.

This exultant master course in the fine art of hip-hop, which opened on Wednesday night at the Booth Theater, suggests that there’s no feeling, thought or experience so anxious or so random that it can’t be translated into infectious, neon-bright rhythms. Confusion, frustration, depression — such emotions are banished by the team assembled on the stage to find the great, sick beat in your past and present woes.

If you’re asking who gives a rap on Broadway, you clearly haven’t been in that neighborhood since a show called “Hamilton” opened there four years ago. That trophy-laden hip-hop portrait of America’s founding fathers redefined what a Broadway musical could be, finding an authenticity and vitality in the lives of those long dead through a defiantly contemporary sound.

The team behind that work included Lin-Manuel Miranda — its writer, composer and original star — and Thomas Kail, its director. They are also the creators of “Freestyle Love Supreme,” along with Anthony Veneziale, who conceived the idea for it 15 years ago.

On the night I saw the show, directed by Mr. Kail, the amiable M.C. in chief was Mr. Veneziale. The rest of the cast (which isn’t fixed) included two fellow rappers (Utkarsh Ambudkar and Aneesa Folds), two beatboxers (Chris Sullivan and Kaila Mullady) and two keyboard players (Arthur Lewis, who also sings sweetly, and Ian Weinberger).

There is also a guest star at each performance. Mine was Mr. Miranda, whom the crowd greeted with the kind of cheers that follow clock-beating touchdowns at home-team stadiums. Finally, it was possible to make out that Mr. Miranda was saying, like a Dolly Levi in denim, that it was so nice to be back on Broadway, where he belongs.

Indeed he does. And so does “Freestyle,” seen Off Broadway at the Greenwich House Theater earlier this year. This production may lack a script, a song list and a chorus line. Yet it is, in its way, the distilled essence of that venerable national institution, the musical comedy.

The enduring appeal of that form lies in its ability to exalt the everyday by endowing it with the pattern of rhythmic song. This is also what the spontaneous, self-created musicians of the 1970s were doing in the Bronx, when rap began its unstoppable spread through this country’s culture.

What distinguishes “Freestyle Love Supreme” from other Broadway songfests is that its numbers spring into existence before your very eyes, or ears. And you, dear audience members, are the co-authors of these numbers — feeding the onstage crew the words, ideas and emotions that they then transform into improbably rhymed performance pieces.

That means live theater doesn’t get more live than this. “Freestyle” demands that you exist purely in the here-and-now of the show. And to guarantee you do so, it requires that all smartphones (and smartwatches) be locked into Yondr pouches before you take your seat. (Can’t we make this a universal practice on Broadway?)

Unmediated experience. How scary. How liberating.

What you see onstage, before the cast arrives, is more or less a tabula rasa. Beowulf Boritt’s set consists of four stools, a couple of keyboards, a bongo drum and a blazing neon icon of the show’s logo. You hear the performers before you see them, doing highly audible mic checks in the wings.

Then as the dim stage brightens (Jeff Croiter did the lighting), they’re on. Which means you are, too.

With a silken patter that never stoops to snark or condescension — and an inclusive attention that reaches deep into the mezzanine — Mr. Veneziale asks the audience to feed him words. (There is also a box full of words on slips of paper, to which theatergoers can contribute before the show begins.)

Who knew how malleable and melodic the verb “dribble” could be? Or that there really are rhymes for “meniscus”? Or that any performer possessed the concentration to keep all these words in play for the entire performance?

When the theatergoers are asked to come up with names of things they hate, it may seem like an invitation to partisan rancor. But this production has a way of appropriating and defusing what makes people angry and uncomfortable.

The hate objects on the night I saw this show were “jalapeño,” “Brexit” and “living in New York City.” Mr. Ambukdar took jalapeño, and turned the peppery noun into a sweetly scatological lament about indigestion. Mr. Veneziale riffed tartly on Brexit.

Ms. Folds, a newcomer to the team with a singing voice that scales the heights of exasperation, took us on a rhymed excursion through the overcrowded purgatory of Times Square. “Meniscus,” an anatomical term referring to a part of the knee, became the improbable basis for deeply heartfelt love letters to family members (Mr. Miranda’s children; Mr. Ambudkar’s bride).

With godlike generosity, the longest set pieces allow an audience member to relive and redeem a regrettable moment from the past and — for the pièce de résistance — to see her day (the day of this performance) turned into an instant musical comedy. (In this case, since the volunteer was a theater student, Mr. Veneziale got to crow, “I am not throwing away my shot” — a key lyric from “Hamilton” — which allowed Mr. Miranda to offer a terse critique on his delivery.)

There are elements of satire throughout, but they are never vicious or sharp-edged. “Freestyle Love Supreme” takes the love part of its title seriously. Any insults exchanged here bring to mind gentle teasing within an affectionate family.

As the rappers turn chaos into cadence, let’s not forget who lays the foundation for the metamorphoses: Mr. Sullivan, whose voice becomes an inspirational symphony of percussive noises.

At one point, Ms. Mullady enters to perform a beat duet with Mr. Sullivan. The throbbing begins with that ultimate beat-maker, the human heart. The performers enact what looks like an instant surgical heart exchange, so they can share the same rhythm.

That’s a pretty good a metaphor for the blissful achievement of this show. We’ve all been given a transplant of a heart that, as they say, beats as one. And for the show’s all-too-fleeting 85 minutes, it’s possible to believe that rhythm and rhyme are a miracle cure for all that ails us.

Freestyle Love Supreme

Tickets Through Jan. 5 at the Booth Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, freestylelovesupreme.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.

Freestyle Love Supreme

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Ben Brantley is the co-chief theater critic for The New York Times. He has been a staff critic since 1996, filing reviews regularly from London as well as New York. Before joining The Times in 1993, he was a staff writer for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

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