The curtain has gone up on Holler If Ya Hear Me, a Broadway stage musical giving the ever-popular "jukebox musical" treatment to the songs of Tupac Shakur. The central character, although clearly based on Shakur, is not actually him (IT'S NOT HIM, HAVE YOU GOT THAT, SHAKUR ESTATE?). It tells the tale of John (NOT TUPAC, and played by slam poet Saul Williams) emerging from a six-year jail term desperate to go straight, but pretty soon given a route back into The Life by his mama-fixated drug kingpin pal Vertus (Christopher Jackson). Along the way there is, says CBS, liberal talk of drugs, promiscuous sex and gun violence, and of course "use of the N word". Sounds great!
Sadly, CBS also describes early reviews as "tepid", with the general consensus being: "Nice songs, shame about the painfully cliched storyline or occasional lack thereof, and general feeling of brain-melting confusion as we attempt to crowbar one artist's songs into a narrative framework." Shakur's songs, says Jesse Green of New York Magazine, "certainly pack a wallop of information, if you can grasp them as they come at you in mile-a-minute sixteenth-note barrages [but] there are too many moments where you have no idea what is going on". The feeling of being slightly beaten into submission is a recurring theme – the show, says Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, "punches home its message with a relentlessness that may soon leave you numb to the tragic story it's trying to tell. The moralising gets to be a drag … and the musical's other pointed messages about social inequality don't need to be hollered."
Not everybody has been so restrained. "Clunky," was the verdict of Variety's Marilyn Stasio. "The performers are so overly miked that the lyrics are almost unintelligible. [For those] who showed up to hear the writings of a famous street poet, it's maddening to have to keep scanning this huge cast to see whose lips are moving." To Time Out's David Cote, the show is "a shapeless mix of melodrama, music video and half-grasped musical cliches." Praise has been heaped on the star qualities of Williams, but ultimately, says Matt Windman of AM New York, "the cast cannot rescue the show." So is there a Tupac-related quip that can be employed to sum all this up? There is, and it belongs to the Guardian's own Alexis Soloski, who ends her two-star assessment of the show thusly: "strictly all eyez on the exit." Tupac will be spinning in his grave. But then, of course, it's NOT ABOUT TUPAC. Got that?
