And no, we’re not talking about that one street in your city that is Broadway, but the Great White Way in NYC. The real Broadway, which has brought you classic plays like “RENT,” “Les Miserables,” “FELA!” and other classics just might be bringing you the hilarity that is the “Trapped In The Closet” saga, brought to you by the R-uh.
While at a screening in NYC to showcase the newest episodes and twisted plotlines of “Trapped In The Closet” earlier this week, which recently debuted on the IFC channel, R. Kelly said that he had been offered the opportunity to possibly take his characters and storytelling to the big stage, and he says, “To transform it into a Broadway version, that’s what I’m working on.” According to CBS News, R. Kelly will also appear in a few performances, and he says that he had always wanted to act, so doing “Trapped In The Closet” allowed him the chance to do so:
“I’m just having a lot of fun. I don’t have a job, so I sit in the studio all day and think of stuff to do and this is just something stupid I’ve done that’s been successful for me,” he said. “I’m having a lot of fun with it.”
And according to Rolling Stone, you’re probably going to have fun watching the newest episodes in what they and Kelly call his “hip-hopera.” The plotlines include everything from characters with HIV, folks fighting against a mob boss, and a pimp (ya’ll remember Lucius) trying keep his business going. And if these new episodes aren’t enough for you, I’m sure you will be geeked to know that Kelly says he has more than 50 new chapters coming and he’s ready to milk this cow and drive this car until the wheels fall off. Yay.
As he said to reporters after the screening, according to CBS News:
“I want everybody to know I’ve got 85 chapters of ‘Trapped in the Closet’ waiting in the studio for y’all,” he said. “The chapters that are coming – the show, we call it – is going to exceed every chapter that you have ever seen.”
As entertaining as these short opuses of rachetness are, I just truly can’t see “Trapped In The Closet” as something to take seriously on Broadway, especially since there is climactic ish going on every five minutes: “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S A MAN!” OH MY GOD IT’S A MIDGET!” “OH MY GOD IT’S A RUBBER!”–and on and on and on. But it’s clear that the people like what R Kelly is serving in his interesting form of storytelling, and we know there will be more colorful shenanigans that somebody will pay to see if it ends up on Broadway for real. Question is, would you be one of those people paying to see “Trapped In The Closet” on Broadway?
