Russell Simmons Is Ready to Bring Rap to Broadway
Last week, Russell Simmons announced that he’d be bringing hip-hop to Broadway with the production of The Scenario, a new musical culled from more than 30 years of the genre’s hits. Simmons enlisted hip-hop historian-author Dan Charnas (The Big Payback) to pen the script — think Love Story meets Public Enemy, says the hip-hop mogul — and is planing to debut the musical in late 2016 with a mix of actual rap songs and musicalized versions of classic tracks.
Hip-hop has had a mixed run on Broadway in recent years. While the Tupac Shakur-inspired musical Holler if Ya Hear Me barely made it out of previews before closing last year, Hamilton, the new Lin-Manuel Miranda musical examining U.S. history through hip-hop, has broken records off-Broadway and has already sold $6.5 million worth of tickets, four months before its July 13th Broadway debut.
Simmons spoke to Rolling Stone about The Scenario‘s rock & roll inspiration, its differences from Holler and why he’s so confident the show will be a success.
How did the idea for a hip-hop musical start?
I met the guys at [The Scenario production company] Big Block and they took me to see [hard-rock jukebox musical] Rock of Ages. I saw it and said, “What the fuck? This is exactly what I need to do.” It was the most obvious thing in the world to me. I was inspired when I saw it. I must be getting old because what I’m doing now is right squarely in the middle of Broadway, which is squarely in the middle of America. It’s overdue.
So is it fair to call The Scenario the “Rock of Ages of hip-hop”?
Yeah, that’s a fair statement. My ex-wife said, “Why don’t we just call it Rap of Ages?” I was like, “Can we be more original?”
What do you envision The Scenario looking like?
It’ll be half-concert, half-storytelling. Something like this deserves a little bit of a love story and a little bit of [Public Enemy’s] “Fight the Power.” It’s not easy to write, but it’s easy to conceive of. It’s all the old people going to the Broadway theatre and seeing rebellious youth culture [laughs]. Two generations later, rap still has that rebelliousness; it hasn’t changed. At the same time, though, it’s successful pop culture. We’ve never had an American cultural phenomenon like this that has spanned so many generations.
The life story of hip-hop is Ice Cube’s Are We There Yet?, not [N.W.A’s] “Fuck tha Police.”
How do you balance that rebelliousness with Broadway’s more mainstream tendencies?
With black pop culture, we changed the landscape where it doesn’t have to be rebellious; we’re proud of it anyway. It doesn’t have to be hated by the mainstream. I don’t think we’re going to face any resistance. Anyone who resists this is just a foreigner to pop culture. I’m old. Rap’s old. It’s accessible. It’s mainstream. Putting a bunch of guys onstage to tell poems for six years [in Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam] was unheard of. So I did fun, alternative shit. This. Is. Not. One of them. This is the least alternative shit, but it’s a celebration of hip-hop.
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