By Isaac Hamlet
On stage, a murder is being planned.
Members of the Q Brothers’ Collective position actors while a sample of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is cued up. A few minutes later, scarves of gore burst forth from Julius Caesar as he’s stabbed.
All this is part of the rehearsal for the Q Brothers’ latest project, Rome, Sweet, Rome, a reinvention of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a rap musical, that opens at 8 p.m. today in the Theater Building’s Thayer Theater.
While the Q Brothers’ regular team typically remains small, its time at Iowa has allowed the group to expand the casts and include more people in its productions.
“We usually do our shows with four or five people, so being able to punch up the dance [with 12 bodies] has really brought to life numbers that we haven’t been able to do prior,” said JQ, one of the play’s directors. “Watching 12 people dance behind someone while a song is happening is a lot of eye candy, and I love that a lot.”
JQ and co-director GQ have spent the past 17 years working their way through Shakespeare’s canon, adding music and modern elements to each of the adaptations in the process.
The University of Iowa brought the troupe in this year to help honor the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death. With the election nearing, they decided the time was ripe to tackle *Julius Caesar* and the political themes the piece contains.
“That we found several parallels [between the politics then and now] speaks to the timeless nature of these stories,” JQ said. “We just embellished or punctuated [particular elements] in a certain way.”
Though the play doesn’t draw any direct comparisons between any of its characters and the current candidates, ideas of dangerous leaders, questions of who the elites really serve, and how foreign policy is handled are concepts that can be found at the heart of the piece.
“We’ve mixed all those elements into all those characters and mixed all of them into [our] Rome which is a mix of modern D.C. and ancient Rome,” JQ said.
The group does its best to make this setting apparent early on. Near the beginning, the audience sees the character Flavius (styled in the adaptation as “Flavius Flav”) hosting a CNN-style debate that stresses the differences between the “Poplicrates” and the “Noblicans.”
To help capture Flavius as a character, Leela Bassuk — who also portrays Brutus’s wife, Portia — watched hours of Flavor Flav music videos.
“[Working on the play] made me realize how musical Shakespeare actually is,” Bassuk said. “It really has a cadence and flow to it.”
Drawing from the rich palette provided by hip-hop, the Q Brothers have let their musical decisions be driven by the characters themselves.
“If a certain character is super verbose and super rhyme-schemey we might use an Eminem style beat,” JQ said. “If someone is really aggressive and dissing someone else, we’ll look at archetypes for that type of rap and use that for inspiration.”
Prior to working on the production, Bassuk hadn’t listened to much rap or hip-hop. Having spent roughly five weeks working on Rome, Sweet, Rome, though, she thinks the Iowa City community has the opportunity to witness something unlike anything they’ve seen before.
