April 20, 2022
Page 7
Arts &
ENTERTAINMENT
With Humor and Tenderness
Photo by Joan Marcus/Portland Center Stage
Artists riff, rhyme, improvise and connect with an audience in “Freestyle Love Supreme,” now show-
ing through May 1 at Portland Center Stage. Pictured are Kaila Mullady (from left), Morgan Reilly,
Andrew Bancroft, and Jay C. Ellis.
Cast connects
in "Freestyle
Love Supreme"
Opinionated
Judge
by
Darleen
Ortega
The national tour of “Free-
style Love Supreme,” now hav-
ing a run at Portland Center
Stage, isn’t a play in the tradi-
tional sense. It’s more of a meth-
od, a process, a practice of play-
fulness and collaboration and
community. For 90 minutes, sev-
eral talented artists riff, rhyme,
improvise, and play with the
audience and with each other. A
rotating cast of performers invite
audience members to toss out
ideas, stories, and pet peeves;
each audience offering gets at
least a friendly toss, and some
get embroidered into an intuitive
comedic mash-up. No two per-
formances are the same.
The project was born during
rehearsal breaks for the original
production of “In the Heights.”
Anthony Veneziale, who was
the host of the performance I
saw, is credited as having con-
ceived the show, and co-created
it with Lin-Manuel Miranda and
director Thomas Kail (who also
directed Miranda’s hit musicals
“In the Heights” and “Hamil-
ton”).
Veneziale and Kail were fast
friends in college, and lightning
struck when they met Miranda.
In the midst of other projects—
and, indeed, powering those
projects—the friends, along
with others they gathered, built a
show around engagement. Start-
ing with a loose but intentional
structure, they built each show
on their collective love for each
other, for rapping and beat-box-
ing and singing and entertaining,
and for the joy of performing and
connecting with an audience.
The show lived on through 15
years of performing in venues of
all sizes even after the energies
of Miranda and Kail got pulled
into other major projects. Then,
in 2019, they gathered the orig-
inal crew for a Broadway run
in 2019 and 2020. The histo-
ry of the show is well-captured
in the 2020 documentary, “We
Are Freestyle Love Supreme”
(available on Hulu), which in-
cludes footage from throughout
the show’s various iterations and
makes a great accompaniment to
the show itself.
Veneziale played his founda-
tional role as host in the Portland
show I saw, and he is a wonder.
Continued on Page 11