The 2014 Tony Awards boasted few if any surprise winners. But no one expected host Hugh Jackman to team with legendary rapper LL Cool J and three-time Grammy winner T.I. on a rap version of "Rock Island," the opening number of The Music Man.
Jackman related that at age 14 he prepared for his first high school theater audition by learning all eight parts to "Rock Island." He then proved he still remembers them by treating viewers to a bit of the number, starting in a hokey "legit" mode but morphing it into a rap tonality. "Broadway composer Meredith Willson," he explained, "might have actually created one of the very first rap songs ever, back in 1957."
Whereupon he, LL Cool J, and T.I. dug in for real.
Nearly every production number on any Tony Awards broadcast is a "commercial" for a current or upcoming show. But there's no known Music Man revival in the works for Broadway, with or without rapping. So was this bizarre number just for fun?
Fact is, hip-hop culture has been muscling its way onto the Great White Way for some time. The new musical Holler If Ya Hear Me, based on the lyrics of the late Tupac Shakur, is now in previews at the Palace Theatre. The Tony-winning musical In the Heights, about New York's Dominican-American Washington Heights neighborhood, brought its hip-hop and salsa sounds to Broadway in 2008.
Cross-pollination of rap and Broadway has been going on in the recording studio at least since Jay-Z's once-ubiquitous breakthrough hit "Hard Knock Life" sampled Annie back in 1988. It works the other way, too: Recently Jimmy Fallon and Anne Hathaway turned Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice," 50 Cent's "In Da Club" and Kendrick Lamar's "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe" into show tunes on The Tonight Show.
As we noted a few days ago, a great many African-American performers and shows about African-American culture have graced Broadway this season. There's anecdotal evidence the size of the black Broadway audience is ticking upward accordingly. Will this apparent trend take hold and build? Maybe Tupac has the answer.
Or maybe Wolverine.
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