As the world premiere of Co-Founders the Musical takes the stage at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco (through July 6), just a Bay Bridge or BART ride away from its Oakland setting, the show might be considered one of the most anticipated homegrown productions in modern Bay Area theatre history.
Written by Ryan Nicole Austin, fellow Oaklander Adesha Adefela, and Seattle native and Stanford alum Beau Lewis, the East Bay-set show is all about showcasing Oakland’s historic rap scene, as it tells a story about the dark side of Silicon Valley wealth and its impact on places adjacent to fresh wealth. The musical is the product of a years-long campaign by Rhyme Combinator, a hip-hop collective that makes viral media, founded by Lewis, Jodie Ellis, Brent Schulkin, and Jason Tan. After first debuting at Silicon Valley Fashion Week in 2017, Co-Founders now has some of the Bay’s most innovative creatives determined to take back a narrative that sits on Town bizness.
“A previous lyric on one of our iterations of the show says, ‘No joking without Oakland guaranteed the magic dies,’” said Austin, a fourth generation native, who isn’t just a co-writer and co-producer but also plays Kamaiyah. “I really think that sums up the tenor and the texture of the show.”
Oakland is arguably the most soulful city in the Bay Area; it’s the epicenter of blue-collar Alameda County, which has always had a hardscrabble feel, and for many years, sports teams that called Oakland home reflected the city’s edge. The renegade football Raiders and the mustachioed baseball Athletics of the 1970s were beloved by the crazies who filled the cold, brutalist architecture structure known as “The Coliseum” year after year to cheer on their heroes. And the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, long serving as the doormat for professional basketball teams through the bulk of their 47 East Bay years, felt like a glow-up with the arrival of Stephen Curry and four championships since 2015.
But Oakland has hit the skids with these teams, with the Raiders moving to Vegas in 2020 and the Warriors finding new revenue streams in the glitzier San Francisco. Even the Athletics, led by their penny-pinching billionaire owner, bailed on their home of 57 years to crash on Sacramento’s couch for three years while pursuing their own Las Vegas move.
In the musical, Austin’s Kamaiyah bemoans the blatant disrespect shown by those billion-dollar professional franchises who used to call “The Town” home bouncing out and leaving Oakland’s innovative spirit behind:
Man, first the Dubs go and bounce
Then the Raiders moving out
We gotta go to Sac to see the A’s
The struggles of this city of 436,000 residents and its stunning topography, including a sparkling lake, are two things Oaklanders would never gloss over. Indeed, very little can diminish the strong self-assuredness of the citizens at the heart of this city, who are often the most prideful bunch of grizzled dreamers, and for good reason. Despite being jilted in some rather ugly sports divorces, along with city governments that have had their share of corruption (the previous mayor, Sheng Thao, was recalled this past January amid a federal indictment on bribery charges), the group of acclaimed Oakland theatre artists behind Co-Founders are determined to showcase some of the most prestigious aspects of this city’s artistic history, in particularly its rap heritage.
The list of names who built their bar spitting in the East Bay is long: MC Hammer, Keak da Sneak, Mistah F.A.B., Del the Funky Homosapien, and Too $hort. Nearby, E-40’s roots in Vallejo and ubiquity all around the Bay ensures his most popular tunes are regional anthems. Broadway and film star Daveed Diggs calls Oakland his artistic home, having rapped all over the Bay Area in his teens before heading off to college and then blowing up in the original cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash Hamilton.
Tupac Shakur, aka 2Pac, claimed Oakland without question before his untimely death in 1996, collaborating with another East Bay hip-hop institution, Digital Underground, before his own explosion as an all-time great. Even Los Angeleno Kendrick Lamar, in his epic diss track “Not Like Us,” reminded Canadian pretty boy Drake that there are levels to this game, with a certain city and rapper he best not try and come for:
You think the Bay gon’ let you disrespect Pac, n****?
I think that Oakland show gon’ be your last stop, n****
To put it mildly, and to paraphrase the late Oakland rap legend Mac Dre, you can say this breezy port city is justifiably “feelin’ itself.”
“Oakland is the heartbeat of this show,” Austin said. “There is a resilience, a soulfulness that is borne of this conflagration of Ohlone peoples, Latinx peoples, and Black folks that migrated from the south who are two to three generations in Oakland. It’s a blue-collar town, so everybody knows a little bit about rolling up their sleeves and doing what they have to do to get by.”
The show’s storyline follows one of the Bay Area’s most common existential crises. Esata is a young West Oakland Black woman coder who makes it clear early on in the play why she codes: Silicon Valley riches, she believes, shouldn’t belong solely to the Palo Altos and San Franciscos of the world. Along with small-town college dropout Conway, Esata decides to hack into a San Francisco startup accelerator. As Esata emphatically states, “I’m gonna code a way for The Town.”
Not only is the story, which went through 13 rewrites, delving deeply into Oakland’s underrated contribution to the region’s rep for innovation, it also features some groundbreaking, next-level technology of its own, via a collaboration with Unreal Engine, a 3D creation platform developed by Epic Games best known for its ability to allow creators (mainly in video games and virtual production) to build immersive, real-time environments.
For this production, ACT combined this tech with projections to allow humans and holograms to interact with each other. In the show, Esata’s big idea is “DADvatar,” an acronym for “Digital Animation of Deceased Avatar,” modeled after her own deceased father. DADvatar is played by Tommy Soulati Shepherd, who uses an Xbox controller backstage to control a hologram and interact in real time with his cast-mates onstage. The end result goes way beyond the common use of high-definition projections found on regional and Broadway stages.
Still, despite all the bells and whistles currently being hung in ACT’s Strand Theater, the purity and rawness of authentic Bay Area rap is still the star of the show.
“It has to be a deep conviction, because there could have been times where it was easy for us to give up the commitment to making things sound authentic,” said Adefela, who grew up in Oakland with theatre—her mother was a performer in the long-running San Francisco hit Beach Blanket Babylon—and who also plays a supporting role in the show. “But we’re not just trying to do another traditional piece of theatre. We’re telling a story that is very important to us and very important to our audience. We don’t want to fake the funk on this.”
The show’s music was first introduced to the public as a mixtape, with collaborations from Bay Area legends such as E-40, Tyjai from Hieroglyphics, and Grammy-nominated songwriter Latif. Those versions aren’t the exact versions you’ll hear in the show, but they still contain many of the sounds and ideas of the story. It’s also an example of what the creatives aimed for: crafting an authentic sound that transcends a musical theatre stage.
“It’s also broader than that, and about really modern music that we love, that reflects the breadth of other influences from the Bay,” said Lewis, who is also the CEO of Rhyme Combinator. “I grew up listening to hip-hop, that’s kind of my genre, but there’s so much more to be able to feel that I’m learning, such as a quiet moment when contrasted with the wonderfully dense repetition of lyrics that comes in through the bar.”
All these elements are thrilling for Jamil Jude, artistic director of Atlanta’s True Colors Theatre Company, who’s directing Co-Founders. Jude knows that his contribution must go beyond what the incessant slaps of the music, which leans into the Bay’s innovative hyphy sound, and what the eye-popping visuals are doing. There is a story to tell, and it must be told well.
“I’m a big believer that, whatever lens you choose, communicating the specificity of that human experience is what communicates the universal,” said Jude, who started working on the production on Zoom during the pandemic in 2020, a pairing which he jokingly refers to as a blind date arranged through the National Alliance for Musical Theatre. “What’s been really fun, especially with the artists we’ve collaborated with, is trying it on their individual bodies and perspectives that they bring into the room. What’s important as a director, and something that maybe is my superpower, is asking, how can I activate the humans that are embodying these characters? How can I empower them to bring a little bit of that special sauce to the role so we can really get down to an emotional depth that goes beyond the superficial?”
The special sauce stirred within the characters applies to the story, and even to the region. This is art made not just for Oakland, but for all those cities that live in the shadows of bigger cultural and innovation hubs, and indeed anyone now facing other forms of marginalization. That’s what moves the show beyond just being a celebration of a regional zeitgeist, and into something more significant, where huge questions are asked about who this world is being built by and for.
One thing that can be stated without question: This show is built for right now.
“It’s interesting how many specific events had to happen in order for us to come together as a team,” Adefela said. “One of the things I’ve come to realize is that at one point we were afraid that, as we were building the show, some of our tech points would become irrelevant. The tech was moving so fast and we couldn’t keep our story up. But I’ve found that in these seven or eight years we’ve been writing, we actually need this story more and more.
“At the end of one of our songs on the album we just released, it ends with, ‘Oakland’s time is now.’ And I believe this story’s time is now.”
David John Chávez is chair of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association and a two-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (’22-’23), serving as jury chair in ‘23. He is a regular theatre contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, KQED and American Theatre magazine among others. Follow him on Bluesky @davidjchavez.bsky.social.
