Todd Kreidler: Whatever strikes me about it is contradictory, you know, whatever I feel that he brought truth to life. There are many ideas that he wrote about -- there's truth in them! He's identifying with the people hitting back. People have those feelings, and I feel like, again I'm not a 2Pac scholar by any stretch of the imagination, but that's why I find the material so rich and that's why I feel he's like Shakespeare, because there's a whole universe inside this music

There's all these different voices and different things, and they're repeating, and I guess the opportunity for this show was to take the "I" out of it. Okay, this is all contained in his head, kind of thing -- let's show that he's absorbing and generating that into arts and communicating things that are around him, what he saw and the world that he saw. So those two numbers are the perfect example -- to take two seeming contradictions and it works beautiful. Even when in the song, Corrine has the line "I know where the brothers from around the block, brothers like to clown a lot". That whole thing is characterized by her talking to Saul! You know what I mean? I love how those two numbers talk to each other. That was what it was. If there's anything I'm trying to do is -- initially just the block talking to each other -- but on the larger scale, have the audience talking to each other. I love when our houses are really mixed, because then you have audiences and they're responding to different things in the piece