BARD GOES BLING-BLING
400 Years Later, Play Goes Hip-Hop

A group of rap artists, break-dancers, an underground disk jockey and a grand-opera director have transformed that 1938 toe-tapping Broadway show into a thumping jive British version that brings the musical tradition of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart bracingly into the 21st century.

This updating of "The Boys from Syracuse," itself a bawdy reworking of Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors," is at the Theater Royal, Stratford East in the London borough with the highest number of young people and the greatest ethnic diversity of any in Britain.

A pioneering theater, the Stratford East has had a penchant for stirring up the London stage with productions like Joan Littlewood's 1963 satire "Oh, What a Lovely War!," a vaudeville-style treatment of World War I. Now it is doing so again with this ethnic overhaul. A booming sound system and two large video screens have been installed onstage, the strutting singers all carry hand microphones, the doors stay open to let people wander and the seats have been removed from the ground floor level so the audience can do some swaying of its own to the insistent rhythms of rap.

This could be great; it could be terrible. That it is British gives me hope.

I still have a really bad taste in my mouth from that gang-banger Romeo and Juliet film a few years ago...

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