A musical improv show that grew out of a hip-hop improv group started by Lin-Manuel Miranda and his friends, called Freestyle Love Supreme, is being performed twice tonight in San Francisco following a run on Broadway and just before a documentary about it premieres at Sundance.
Freestyle Love Supreme began with a group that used to gather in the basement of New York City's Drama Book Shop back in 2003. That group included Miranda, Thomas Kail — who would go on to become the director of In the Heights and Hamilton both off- and on Broadway — Hamilton star Christopher Jackson, Anthony Veneziale, Utkarsh Ambudkar, and Chris Sullivan, and would come to include others over the years.
The group performing in San Francisco — doing shows at both 7 and 10 p.m. tonight at the Sydney Goldstein Theater, the latter of which still has tickets available — is likely to include Veneziale, Ambudkar, and Sullivan, and they're ostensibly performing the same show that closed at Broadway's Booth Theater two weeks ago. It involves "a freestyle, hip-hop, improvisational, never-before-seen comedy ride all based off audience suggestions."
The show is part of SF Sketchfest, the 18-day comedy/movie/improv fest that wraps up this weekend, and the second show got added after the first one sold out.
Below is a trailer for the documentary, which Playbill says is premiering next week, January 28 and 31, at the Sundance Film Festival. The doc features footage of the group, including Miranda, shot over 15 years, and it just may show how Miranda's work with a similar group he and Veneziale started at Wesleyan University came to influence how he writes hit musicals. (Just press play, even though no image is showing up.)