The game of creating art has one rule, to me, and that’s that there are no rules. I recently dealt with a situation where the answer to how we could maintain my original vision as a play of mine transfers into a film project was that “It’s not how things are done in Hollywood.” It was an answer that only made me laugh, because if there’s one thing I could give a shit about in my life it’s how to play by pre-established rules when creating art is concerned. Luckily, that works both ways. If one person is swept away by the brazenly unstructured work of Picasso and another is equally affected by a bucolic scene dabbed into shaky submission by Grandma Moses, who’s to say which canvas is the more important or worthy—or even historically accurate barometer of the time it was first produced—when it comes to any work of art?

That said, nothing could be truer when it comes to theatre. One person’s Annie is another person’s Batboy is another person’s Sweeney Todd; with proper marketing, there’s room onstage for trying out just about anything if you can find the financial backing to do so. As new works by the legendary and sufficiently ancient Jerry Herman (The Grand Tour at the Colony) and another by that glorious upstart Michael John LaChiusa (The Wild Party at the Hudson) energize our town, a whole new musical theatre genre is being born at the Stella Adler: rapmasters Sable and Batalion’s knockout retelling of the biblical story of Job, set in the offices of the “baddest and phattest” Los Angeles hip-hop record company.

Luckily for Angelenos, J.O.B. The Hip-Opera, following successful runs in Montreal, off-Broadway and the Edinburgh Festival, still features its creators, Jerome Sable and Eli Batalion, two decidedly un-hip-hoppy looking white dudes who energize the stage with their manic, electric rap skills and meteoric character transformations. Playing everyone from gnarled label president and deity substitute J. Hoover (as in Jehovah) to Hoover Records’ slimy V.P. of Finance Lou Sapphire (sounds like?) to A&R specialist and timid everyman Job Lowe, Sable and Batalion pass their characters from one to the other as though they were playing a quick game of musical softball, settling in between the efforts into their more solid roles, that of M.C. Cain and M.C. Abel, two would-be rappers stuck unceremoniously in the company’s bottom floor jingle department.    

LA wünderkind director Stefan Novinski has taken the hour-long J.O.B. The Hip-Hopera and, with the help of the local Company of Strangers’ dynamic co-director/ choreographer Hassan Christopher, developed it into a breakneck, raucous, spellbinding 90 minute treat. With gospel-hearty vocals added by Nikkema Taylor and DJ Creativity working live in the onstage “booth,” the original score by Sable and Batalion with Joe Barrucco is surprisingly unpredictable, melding from street tough to classical to tango in a meteoric scratch of a turntable.

The ensemble of agile and ridiculously committed dancers is also topnotch, with particular praise offered for the two male members of the troupe, choreographer Christopher and Shawn Beck-Gifford, a guy who looks like the last person who could master this style until his limbs turn him immediately into a latter-day Cab Calloway.

More than anything else I could say in praise of J.O.B. The Hip-Hopera, however, the one facet of this exceptional presentation that stands out above everything else is the whimsical, spirited choreography of Hassan Christopher, whose passion is combining classical, modern and urban contemporary urban dance forms into “post-hop-hop kinetic storytelling.” Theatergoers in City of Los are lucky to be hosting a visit from misters Sable and Batalion, who in turn are fortunate to have found local heroes Novinski and Christopher to make their stay here even more special.