Jammin' with the poets at PPAC

By RICK MASSIMO - The Providence Journal

The Def Poetry Jam that comes into the Providence Performing Arts Center Saturday has plenty of similarities to the Tony-winning show that ran on Broadway in 2002 and 2003: Nine poets, in a rainbow of ethnicities, performing poems that speak to their takes on contemporary life in the vocal, impassioned, even muscular style of the poetry slam, with a DJ rocking the house in between the performers.

"These poets grew up on rap," creator, producer and hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons told Playbill, "and they speak the language of the people . . . and give voice to ideas that a lot of people never hear about."

"While other Broadway theaters are filled with revivals of old musicals and revues based on familiar songs," The New York Times wrote in 2002, "Def Poetry Jam is up to the minute."

When it comes to town Saturday night as part of the second leg of its U.S. tour, director Stan Lathan promises "the show's going to be way hotter."

"We learned on the road that we need more excitement when we're out there than for Broadway. So it plays to a young audience.

"On Broadway, we were playing to what we thought was a theater audience, with elements of young people coming in because of Russell's draw. (Russell Simmons, the mind behind Def Poetry Jam, also produces HBO's Def Comedy Jam and is the impresario behind Def Jam Recordings, the nation's first eminent hip-hop record label.)

"But we're playing to more of a concert-going audience now, and the show's hotter."

Almost like music

"Hotter" means more music, Lathan says, more movement, "more poems that are crowd-pleasers" and more poems that were created and are performed in groups of two, three, sometimes the whole nine -- "all the trappings of a musical number, almost."

With a Broadway run and a tour under their belts, Lathan says, the poets are more seasoned performers.

"They really are able to pick up on the vibe of the audience and use it to make their material that much more effective. . . . They're almost like jazz musicians -- there is a theme, but when they're performing, songs are different from night to night."

Lathan says that there are three new poets in the cast of nine for this tour, and the material is between 70 and 80 percent new. The first leg of the U.S. tour ended in May, Lathan says, and he spent a lot of time in the interim acting as "the final word" on new material, resurrecting "classics" from the earlier tour and working with the poets on questions of length and subject matter -- seeking a balance, he says, that is "not overly esoteric, but on the other hand we have to assume we have an intelligent audience."

"We have a multi-ethnic cast, so we want to do poems that they identify with as American poets from whatever background they might be from," Lathan says. "[It's a] really multi-ethnic, varied audience also. We try to give something for everyone without watering down the individual messages. It's quite an undertaking."

Humor, he says, is "one of the things that really makes it work."

A scary notion

In the beginning, putting a poetry show on Broadway was a scary notion for Lathan and Simmons. Simmons had already branched out with the HBO version of Def Poetry Jam in 2002, as well as Def Comedy Jam, but Broadway was different.

"The word 'poetry' scared us more than the words 'Def Jam,' " Lathan says, "because we were afraid that people might have some sort of preconceived notion about people, or a stage. . . . I think that we've gotten over that now, but I think it's something we had to get over."

The Broadway production won a 2003 Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event, but it wasn't nearly as much of a commercial success. Lathan said he and Simmons were "assuming that the Tony Award was something that the people would respond to. We found that there were people finding [the show] who we weren't concentrating on: the young, urban audience and the slightly older urban audience. And those people were responding to the television show."

Lathan said he and the cast had "kind of a love-hate relationship with the experience" of being on Broadway.

"The reviewers loved it, so we couldn't complain about that. But it was tough getting a consistent audience in there. We were kind of swamped by Hairspray and a number of the huge shows," Lathan said, also citing bad weather and a strike.

"We struggled. But the show got better and better, and the audiences were more and more grateful for the experience. It's just that it wasn't growing like you need it to grow.

"But we won the Tony Award; we thought the Broadway experience yielded some reward."

Why go to Broadway?

Which brings up a question: Given Broadway's oft-deserved reputation for stuffiness, why go there when plenty of theater artists simply bypass Broadway, leaving it for dead?

"Broadway was our goal when we were putting it together. . . .

"[But] the thing that we learned when we got out on the road was, the audience that's not that Broadway theater audience . . . is way more responsive and way more open to some of the political views;they appreciated the humor. We just found it was way more gratifying artistically to do it on the road. No comparison. We had a much more successful run, because the artists were moved and inspired by the response of the audience.

"So, stuffy? I don't know about stuffy. But the audiences on the road are certainly far more appreciative, and strongly and vocally appreciative, of the work."

Def Poetry Jam is at the Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St., Providence, Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $42.50, $37.50 and $27.50, and are available at the box office by calling (401) 421-2787 or (401) 331-2211, or online at www.ppacri.org or www.ticketmaster.com.