HOLLER IF YA HEAR ME, the world inside Tupac Shakur's music and lyrics, blazes to life in a non-biographical story about friendship, family, revenge, change and hope. Inner city lives struggle for peace against the daily challenges they face in this entertaining and original musical. Through the poetry of one of the 20th century's most influential and culturally prominent voices, we are given a window into realities of the streets still relevant today.
HOLLER IF YA HEAR ME, written by Todd Kreidler, directed by Kenny Leon, will begin performances on June 2nd, 2014 (1564 Broadway at 47th Street).
The show's ambition to remake the theater couldn't be more literal: The Palace has been converted from a traditional Broadway house into something more like a stadium, with its orchestra drastically foreshortened and steeply raked to meet the balcony after just nine rows. (Some 600 seats were eliminated in the process.) The former rear orchestra section is now given over to a few uncaptioned exhibits on loan from the National Museum of Hip-Hop, including a baby-blue tracksuit apparently worn by someone, and a pair of Timberland boots customized with portraits of Mandela and Obama. If the latter retrofit feels dinky and confusing, the bigger one, much mocked in theater chat rooms in anticipation, actually succeeds, all but hurling the audience into the action.
So let's first praise Holler If Ya Hear Me (*** out of four stars) for what it's doing -- acknowledging that Broadway audiences are growing more diverse, and encouraging that growth -- and, just as important, what it isn't doing: milking nostalgia...Under Kenny Leon's vigorous, sensitive direction, the principal actors -- among them a coolly charismatic Christopher Jackson and a typically warm, fierce Tonya Pinkins -- are convincing and sympathetic, and Waters and choreographer Wayne Cilento mine the robust grooves and soulful nuances in Shakur's material in exhilarating production numbers. Though there are sobering twists -- and contrived ones -- the overall effect is uplifting. By celebrating its subject's creativity rather than exploiting his legend, Holler sets a fundamentally positive example for a problematic form.
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