BWW Blog: Keanna Irving - Shakespeare Meets Hip Hop: A Review of OTHELLO: THE REMIX

The Westside Theatre pulsed with hip hop music and glowed with the neon lights on stage. Did I come to the right place or was this a club? I settled into my seat, ready for this one act ride.

The four men on stage and the DJ on the side told Shakespeare's Othello with loads of well crafted rhymes, and plenty of artistic liberty. The Q Brothers took the Bard's tragedy, modernized it, and inserted comedy to lighten the tragedy. Their interpretation and antics worked much of the time, but fell flat on occasion. However, it was not the fun show or talented performers that really drew my attention, but pure idea of mixing Shakespeare with rap.

Shakespeare wrote for the common people of his time, and the Q Brothers did the same thing by translating the Bard's story into a common language of today: hip hop. This method allowed them to use more words per minute to tell this story and portray this tale in a way that people would be able to follow more easily than Old English. In fact, their effective storytelling allowed me to understand Othello in a way that I had never before. Marrying hip hop and Shakespeare was simply a brilliant move.

While this show could never quite live up to Shakespeare's original, Othello: the Remix reconfigured this classic to fit a modern audience by translating a 16th century play into a witty and energetic hip hop performance. Congratulations to the cast and crew for a successful Off-Broadway run!