'Hype Man: A Break Beat Play' at Cain Park Could Use Some Clarity

There aren't too many musical plays that would improve greatly by moving the last 15 minutes up to the beginning. But Hype Man: A Break Beat Play is one of them, since the concluding moments of the show are interesting, entertaining and informative.

As written by Idris Goodwin, this play is often confusing for those who are not aware of some music industry terms involved. For example, a "hype man" is a backup singer who supports the primary hip-hop singer with shouted words of praise or other ad-libs. In this play, a Black man nicknamed Verb (Avery LaMar Pope) is the hype man while the lead performer is a white dude called Pinnacle (Mugs Johnson).

They are backed by the sound engineer Peep One (Yuval Tal), a mixed-race woman who furnishes the break beats, which are drumbeats with syncopated rhythms that are sampled from earlier recordings of funk, jazz and R&B.

All that knowledge is shared at the end, which is the most engrossing part of this effort. What goes on in the first 75 minutes of this one-act is often garbled, due to the performers not attending to the boring tasks of diction and enunciation.

The fact is, in a live performance—even about hip-hop—if you don't speak the words clearly the language turns into noise. Consider the lyrics in Hamilton, which are spoken with razor-like precision by most companies, to honor the witty and incisive lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

There are also many instances when the three characters are all het up about something and director Jeannine Gaskin allows them to shout at each other, often simultaneously, creating cacophony and not content.

Through all that sonic word salad, it eventually emerges that Verb, Pinnacle and Peep One have different ideas about how to proceed with the trio's career. Pinnacle and Peep want to take advantage of an invitation to appear on TV's Tonight Show while Verb wants them to record a song about a recent police shooting of a young Black man. (It's not entirely clear why they can't do both.

Later on, Verb is arrested in an action that happens off-stage, but he returns to help fill in some of the necessary details before the final curtain. Each of the performers does well when their lines are understandable, but unfortunately that is not frequently enough.

The production is also bogged down by the playwright's insistence on trying to cover a range of social injustice issues and recording industry conflicts instead of focusing. As a result, the script flits from police brutality to recording contract negotiations to the under-representation of women in the hip-hop world. Along the way, some tired observations ("You don't know what it's like to be Black") don't add much insight.

The static set design by Ian Hinz—dominated by a table with sound equipment— also contributes little. This is especially evident when one scene shifts to a live concert, where recorded crowd applause doesn't quite make up the difference.

The words should be the star of Hype Man, a language-forward play if there ever was one. But the words are often buried due to an inattention to the basics of stage performance, and that feels like a huge opportunity missed for this well-intentioned work.

Hype Man
Through July 21 at Cain Park. 14591 Superior Road between Taylor Road and Lee Road in Cleveland Heights, 216-371-3000, cainpark.com .

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