Playbill is reporting that a pilot based on the Freestyle Love Supreme stage show (described as ‘a non-stop, hip hop improv ride, spinning cues from the audience into instantaneous riffs and fully realized musical number’) will be produced, starring Lin-Manuel Miranda. The pilot would feature original music by Miranda and Bill Sherman.

Miranda is a super wordsmith and I’ve enjoyed a great deal of his work, admiring particularly his work on the revival of WEST SIDE STORY, which must have been a pretty thankless job given the hostile stance so many took to Arthur Laurents’s idea of translating certain of the Stephen Sondheim-Leonard Bernstein songs in that score into Spanish. I guess he has to do something now that the In the Heights film has been canned. Of course, he still has Bring it On going. That show ran in January and a tour begins in November. If there are revisions happening there, I guess that’s what he’s busy with at the moment. I hope he manages to keep his momentum going. I would hate to see him go the way of Meredith Willson.

Anyway, I wonder how this will work given that the show upon which the pilot is based relies on interaction with the audience. Will it be like a live hip-hop version of Whose Line is it Anyway? with a live studio audience?

Thoughts?