Freestyle Love Supreme
Opening Night: October 2, 2019
Closing: January 5, 2020
Theater: Booth Theatre
More than 15 years after its inception, Freestyle Love Supreme — the original hip-hop musical phenomenon from Thomas Kail, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Anthony Veneziale — arrives on Broadway. Every performance, the crew takes the crowd on a freestyle, hip-hop, improvisational, never-before-seen comedy ride. See it for the first time every time as the performers take suggestions from the audience and spin them into instantaneous riffs and full-length musical numbers. With special — and spontaneous — guest appearances from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Christopher Jackson, Daveed Diggs, James Monroe Iglehart, and more, every night brings the unexpected.
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October 2, 2019
The Freestyle Love Supreme I saw on Broadway last week won’t be the Freestyle Love Supreme theatergoers see tonight or tomorrow or any other night in its limited, 16-week run. An energetic, insistently likable mash-up of rap, improvisational comedy, hip hop, R&B crooning and, crucially, audience participation, FLS – in its own shorthand – is both the show and the rotating troupe of performers who have been bringing it to unique life off and on, in various venues, since around 2003, now including the Booth Theatre, where it opens tonight.
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October 2, 2019
The M.O. at Broadway’s “Freestyle Love Supreme” may be the same as at any improv show — working from suggestions shouted out from the audience — but the members of this eponymous hip-hop ensemble up the ante by taking those audience cues and elevating them with rapid-fire raps, peppered with spoken-word riffs and wrapped in a musicality that would feel right at home at “Hamilton.” No wonder. One of the show’s creators and producers is the multi-hyphenate Lin-Manuel Miranda, who, on the night this critic attended, appeared as one of the rotating roster of guests who will turn up during this limited engagement that is a mixture of improv, recess and a kind of “Whose Rap Is It Anyway?”
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October 2, 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.
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October 2, 2019
Here’s how talented the members of the improvisational hip-hop troupe Freestyle Love Supreme are. At a recent preview performance of their debut Broadway run, the special guest was Lin-Manuel Miranda. And he wasn’t even the most impressive performer onstage. Miranda, who co-founded the troupe 15 years ago with director Thomas Kail (Hamilton, FX’s Fosse/Verdon) and current member Anthony Veneziale, is but one of several “spontaneous guests” promised for select performances during the limited run, including such fellow Hamilton alumni as Christopher Jackson, Daveed Diggs, Wayne Brady and James Monroe Iglehart. But even if you don’t get to see one of those well-known figures, don’t worry. This inventive, fast-paced show doesn’t need ringers to be wildly entertaining.
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October 2, 2019
Freestyle Love Supreme is a dream of a show: the scheme of a team of thespians from Wesleyan who went with their flow, 16 years ago, to improvise a hip-hop musical. Their act is virtuoso. FLS is a phenomenon, uncommon and on-the-fly—a high wire where performers get by without a guide for the words that pour out from their lips and their lungs (as they try not to trip on the tips of their tongues). Their abilities, their skill and ease, are always impressive, but it’s less of a show-off than a love-in with a geek streak. There’s a reason FLS is so buzzy: It’s not just cool, it’s also warm and fuzzy.
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