Three minutes into the KC Rep's dystopian hip-hop musical, a patron-of-the-arts type complained to her husband, "If they keep rapping, I won't understand the words!" But at intermission, when Matt Sax's arresting beats and flow had set the personal and political crises of the show's future Venetian city-state boiling over, that same skeptical woman exclaimed, "I can't wait 15 minutes! I need the rest now!" This response was not atypical. As if the difficulties of winning the Rep crowd to hip-hop weren't enough, Sax (who narrated and, with Curtis Moore, wrote the music) and Eric Rosen (who wrote the book and directed) retold Othello even as they claimed for musical theater the prickly imaginative terrain of Alan Moore. Dense with allusions but still rocking the block, Venice was a little messy, a lot daring, often thrilling and always memorable.
