For years, the Freestyle Love Supreme experience was “completely ephemeral,” as founding member Thomas Kail puts it. Only those in small theaters, usually 99 seats, who witnessed one of the hip-hop improv group shows live, shared the unique memory and magic of what they broadcast. But through Andrew Fried’s documentary “We Are Love Supreme,” which premiered on July 17 on Hulu, some of those performances received more permanence.
“It was as if we were writing poetry and setting it on fire. And then we ended up writing a couple of novels and people liked our novels, “says Kail, who was also an executive producer on the documentary, about the difference between Freestyle shows Love Supreme and” In The Heights “and Hamilton.” “We thought, ‘Well, what if we go back and show you some of the poetry we wrote?’ Informed and infused novels.
As the founding member of Freestyle Love Supreme and “In The Heights” and “Hamilton” scribe Lin-Manuel Miranda explain, improvised rap with Freestyle Love Supreme “became this skill set that sharpened all other skill sets that were important to me. ” ‘96,000 ‘in’ In The Heights’ was much drawn from the round-trip of Freestyle Love Supreme. As I grew more confident as a writer, I grew more confident knowing that I would have something to say when I went on stage to get suggestions from the audience, and then performing with Freestyle sharpened my brain so I could instill my writing spontaneously. “
Fried’s documentary follows Freestyle Love Supreme in its early days, including the 2005 Edinburgh Festival performance, but it also tracks slightly later hits like “In The Heights,” new members like Utkarsh Ambudkar and his 2019 showcase at the Greenwich House Theater.
Fried is in a unique position as a filmmaker, having had a relationship of more than a decade with his subjects. He was first a fan after watching one of the shows, he recalls, and “two weeks later he was sleeping on his couch” documenting his experience performing at the Edinburgh festival. At the time, he admits, he was “pretending until I did it” and that this documentary work was the first time he had actually produced in the field. He was forming a story he believed could be a television pilot about the group: asking Miranda to read bad reviews aloud to the camera, for example, stemmed from an instinct that Fried had that the group would use material from what it happened to them during the day in their evening shows. “I thought maybe on the show that night they’d start rapping about a bad review and then I’d have an A plot for the pilot,” says Fried.
But time had other plans. Yes, Freestyle Love Supreme had a show with Pivot and even rebooted “The Electric Company”, but those were not experiences Fried had with the group.
“There is a lot of Freestyle Love Supreme history that is not in this movie,” he says. “That was not my story and that was not what my material could bear, to be honest. My experience was much more personal than any other filmmaker could have had, and so I wanted to lean on that. “
Only Fried, for example, had boxes of tapes and hard drives that included Miranda performing on the street or Miranda and Christopher Jackson performing on stage together long before “In The Heights”, let alone “Hamilton”. He had an early look at Kail making his directorial debut, as well as Kail and Miranda working on “In The Heights”. And then there were early performances by Anthony Veneziale, Andrew Bancroft, Arthur Lewis, Bill Sherman, and Chris Sullivan, too. Fried’s personal relationship with the group allowed for a level of confidence and comfort, he says, which in turn made him capture sincere moments of Miranda talking about leaving the singledom and Ambudkar’s journey behind to get sober.
“That connection with which you go up on stage with those people in particular, is different from everything I will have in my career. It’s too special, “says Ambudkar. “There’s a talk at the end of the movie where it’s like, ‘Oh, by the way, this guy could have been in’ Hamilton. ‘But I think what needs to be removed is that the boys’ relationship has been so strong and so familiar first. Something that, from a commercial point of view, was probably an extreme disappointment for Tommy and Lin, where they said, ‘We brought this guy in and he couldn’t deliver’, he became the whole group moving around me, joining arms and supporting myself, along with everyone else in my life, during that difficult moment that I had to go through and continue to go through. “
It wasn’t until 2018, when Freestyle Love Supreme’s Off-Broadway run was established, that Kail says he called Fried and said, “’Why didn’t we finish the movie we were doing 10, 15 years ago? ‘And he said,’ Were we making a movie? ‘ And I said, ‘Well, now we are.’
Looking back through his most mature lens gave them a new appreciation for his energy and spirit on the day, as well as where it helped them get to today.
“It felt like measuring at a door: ‘We were that high and this is how much we’ve grown,'” says Kail.
Ambudkar adds: “The first rap I did on stage was in Freestyle Love Supreme. And just to see that guy, a young boy in his baggy pants that jump so much, so much bravado, there’s a lot of movement in that body. When you see later images of m, there is much less fluidity, but there is more brightness. I miss that child’s exuberance, but I know the mind is much sharper than it used to be. “
The one thing everyone involved in Freestyle Love Supreme knows is that nothing beats the atmosphere inside the theater during a live performance. Miranda admits that seeing the same piece on the screen may come with “a certain skepticism.” That is why it was so important to her that “We Are Freestyle Love Supreme” “deconstructed and removed as much of the process as possible.”
“Wouldn’t it be so liberating to be able to say whatever is in your head, understanding that you remain within that pre-2005 sensitivity of ‘This is for those of us in the room’?” Miranda says of the group’s approach to live shows. “Not only was the show so dependent on us listening to the audience and the audience listening to us, but when we do the show now, we put you in a time machine.”
And the fact that “We Are Freestyle Love Supreme” is released just weeks after the movie “Hamilton” made its own debut is not lost on Miranda. But he calls the moment “total chance”.
“There is a documentary on this thing that we were all doing first, and I think they combine very well. It is very interesting to see what we can think of in real time and then compare it to a musical that took me seven years to write, ”he says.
