Co-Founders
ACT's Riveting World Premiere of a Bay Area Based Hip-Hop Musical
By: Victor Cordell - Jun 14, 2025
With the Tony Awards celebration this week including the tenth anniversary of Hamilton, that musical was lauded for its success through innovation. Not only did it introduce hip-hop to the musical stage, but it attracted a wave of younger theater goers and spawned like adventures into newer musical forms for theater. Fittingly, ACT has launched the world premiere of Co-Founders, a hip-hop musical, and it fulfills the prophesy of Hamilton with a totally engaging production that wowed an audience spanning generations.
Not everyone can be expected to cotton to hip-hop, especially folk raised in an earlier age. Its usual stridency and thumping beat at the expense of melody and lighter subject matter can be off-putting to those nostalgic about the likes of Frank Sinatra, Elvis, or the Beatles. But happily, the moniker “hip-hop musical” is a bit of an overstatement. The show offers a nice mix of pop music along with accessible hip-hop that deals with a range of relatable issues from aspiration to the history of innovation in the Silicon Valley.
The story centers on Esata, a young black Oakland woman, a whiz of a computer coder, who has designed an Artificial Intelligence software to simulate her deceased father. Aneesa Folds plays the role. Her voice conveys both power and beauty, and her acting evokes sympathy as a quality individual whose circumstances have impeded achievement. Esata hopes for acceptance into Xcelerator, a highly competitive high-tech incubator in San Francisco.
Along the way, Esata meets Conway, played by Roe Hartrampf, who is full of bravado but short on substance. He is a young white man from Pennsylvania who has been accepted to Xcelerator. His shortcoming is that he has a concept for virtual reality travel, but he doesn’t have code to flesh it out. Do we see a match made in heaven here? Not exactly, but along the bumpy road, there is hope for a happy outcome.
The relationship between the two wannabes waxes and wanes. Conway knows that he needs someone with Esata’s skill. Though often generous to her, he condescends and also tries to make her the scapegoat for a crash when they are making a demo to Victor, the CEO of Xcelerator. Unexpectedly, life imitated art when the projection system in the theater crashed, resulting in a half-hour delay in the proceedings.
Keith Pinto is Victor, and from his first appearance in a huge headshot video, he establishes himself as a prototypical motivational speaker with a steely visage and unwavering dedication to success at any price. Secondary plots concerning Esata’s friends and mother spice the action. Ryan Nicole Austin and Adesha Adefela, who play two of those roles to great effect are also two of the three playwrights.
Co-Founders is funny and heartfelt and covers a lot of meaningful ground from business ethics to friendship to discrimination, especially concerning the unfair disadvantages faced by black women. The risks of AI are also surfaced, ominously as it facilitates what could be invasive surveillance. A very different concern exists when AI humanoids are treated as human, as when mother and daughter both interact with the digital father that Esata created. These higher order issues have broad appeal.
A major strength at the premiere, however, is likely to be a weakness beyond. Broadly, the musical is a feel-good about the Bay Area, encapsulated in the song “This is the Bay.” But moreso, it is a loving and deserved paean to Oakland, with an abundance of detail about the community that would mean nothing elsewhere. There’s even a little humorous self-deprecation that plays to great laughter in San Francisco, “Would anybody vacation in Oakland?” Meanwhile, when Conway refers to “San Fran,” it elicits the expected groans, and images of a Tesla truck trigger boos.
As wonderful as the script, score, and production are, it is hard to imagine that it would have the same appeal in St. Louis or Savannah. And while many revisions of works shift place or time, Oakland, the Bay Area, and the high-tech world are so engrained in script and songs that it is hard to imagine Co-Founders set elsewhere.
In addition to engrossing stories and characters supported by snappy and varied music composed by Victoria Theodore, Co-Founders is an electronic visual phenomenon. Fantastic projections and videos designed by Frédéric O. Boulay and David Richardson are virtually nonstop on the backstage screen, often supplemented by frontstage images on a scrim. Choreography by Juel D. Lane and music directed by Ben Covello add depth to the experience. And while costumery by Jasmine Milan Williams is largely conventional, outfits and wigs assist actors in playing multiple characters effectively. This major production, which can expect a jubilant run, is all brought together by Director Jamil Jude.
Co-Founders, written by Ryan Nicole Austin, Beau Lewis, and Adesha Adefela with music by Victoria Theodore, is produced by American Conservatory Theater and plays at Strand Theater, 1127 Market Street, San Francisco, CA through July 6, 2025.