1. The Great White Way: Rap on Broadway
By SEAN DOOLITTLE
“If you think about it, Broadway composer Meredith Wilson, he might have actually
created one of the very first rap songs ever back in 1957.” With that, 2014 Tony Awards’ host
Hugh Jackman introduced the most awkward, stilted bit of the otherwise entertaining night: a
call and response rap version of The Music Man’s opening number “Rock Island” with LL Cool J
and T.I. Who knew that a white person, let alone Meredith Wilson — one of the whitest people
to exist, ever — invented rap music? Jackman, he-who-is-not-Neil-Patrick-Harris, probably
didn’t mean to say that, exactly, but it is undeniable that Broadway has an odd relationship with
hip-hop as a musical genre.
Let’s set this straight: “Rock Island” is not a rap song. It’s a patter song. It’s really fast,
it’s rhythmic and hardly any notes are sustained. It’s similar to speak-singing, but with more
alliteration and rhyming; it’s a tongue twister in song-form, and it’s meant to be hilariously
difficult to sing and understand. Patter songs have been a staple of comic opera for over 400
years, made famous in numerous Gilbert and Sullivan works. The best example is “Major-
General’s Song” from 1879’s The Pirates of Penzance, in which Stanley rhymes “lotta news”
with “hypotenuse” at something like 200 beats per minute. It’s impressive — seriously, watch a
video of this, it’s outrageous — but it’s not rap. Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas were the precursor
to what we understand as modern musical theatre, so it’s no wonder that the patter song would
go on to enjoy a long career in many musicals of the 20th century. You’ve got The Music Man’s
opening number and “Ya Got Trouble” and Company’s “Getting Married Today,” among many
others. You even see patter in Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week” and Dylan’s “Subterranean
Homesick Blues.” It’s everywhere.
I suppose I understand why Wolverine might have some difficulty in differentiating
between rap and patter. They are both rhythmic and often include rhyme and a quick tempo.
The main difference, as I see it, is that rap is spoken to a beat, like poetry, and patter is sung,
with each syllable of a word often residing on its own note. Some musical theatre professionals
understand that difference, at least vaguely, and yet rap continues to baffle most composers to
this day. Like all the best examples of appropriation, it took 10 years for white people to notice.
Rap first developed in the late 1970s in the black and Latino neighborhoods of New York, but it
wasn’t until 1986, when Stephen Sondheim was writing Into the Woods, that he decided to try
his hand with the newfangled genre, because, as he wrote in his memoir Look, I Made a Hat,
rap “became omnipresently popular” in the 1980s. In the “Prologue,” Bernadette Peters —
whom I hate, come at me #Lupone4lyfe — raps about rutabagas and watercress and pretty
much just a list of vegetables for an entire passage. It’s cringeworthy and bad. Even Meryl
couldn’t fix that.
Broadway isn’t called “The Great White Way” for nothing. According to the Broadway
League, 80 percent of Broadway theatregoers are Caucasian, with an average age of 44 years
old and an average household income of $200,000. Otherwise known as old, rich white people.
And if there’s one thing old, rich white people love, it’s rap music. A match made in heaven if
there ever was one. Last year, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it production of Holler If You Hear Me,
the Tupac jukebox musical, opened at the Palace Theatre on Broadway and closed its doors
after a disappointing 38 performances. That’s only just above a Carrie: The Musical-level

2. disaster. Some critics blamed the tough economic environment of Broadway and some blamed
the serious nature of the musical.
That’s bogus. The reason the Tupac musical failed is that the typical theatregoer thinks
that Tupac and Biggie are the same person, your average “thug” and not the musical pioneer
and virtuoso he was. Holler was unyielding and violent and real. Maybe too real for Broadway
audiences, but it was true to itself and its message and that’s the most respectable thing a
musical can be.
To his credit, in Look, I Made a Hat, Sondheim goes on to write that the reason he never
wrote more rap in his musicals was not because he couldn’t find a place for it, but because he
“didn’t have the imagination to.” Sondheim credits the incomparable Lin-Manuel Miranda —
writer, composer and star of the hip-hop fusion musical In The Heights — with possessing the
imagination to bring rap into the musical theatre mainstream. Miranda is one of the brightest
minds working in the business today, working toward melding traditional, white Broadway
expectations of narrative and tone with the musical stylings of hip-hop, realizing rap’s musical
potential in ways its never been done before. It’s conventional and experimental; in Sondheim’s
words, “It’s one pathway to the future.”
This season’s hottest theatre ticket is Miranda’s Hamilton, the biography of Alexander
Hamilton as told through the eyes of Aaron Burr. The musical is almost entirely rapped-through
by a diverse cast. It’s a chimera, part-1776, part-hip-hop, that never feels gimmicky or unnatural;
a cultural reimagining that stands poised to, with its upcoming off-Broadway-to-Broadway
transfer this summer, merge the two mediums once and for all. It’s entire run at The Public
Theatre has sold-out, and I’m positive that the Broadway production tickets will be just a difficult
to procure when it opens.
I hope to be first in line, right next to Hugh Jackman, for a ticket when that time comes.