EXCLUSIVE: Beat Street, the Broadway-bound musical based on the groundbreaking 1984 film, has assembled its principal creative team, with The Wiz‘s Schele Williams, Hell’s Kitchen‘s Kristoffer Diaz and music supervisor Jason Michael Webb joining the previously announced Nas on the project.

Nas, the Grammy-winning, multi-platinum rapper, is creating new material for the production and expanding the film’s soundtrack.

Beat Street was one of the first films to depict hip-hop culture, including breakdancing, mixing, scratching, and graffiti art. The film has been cited for its influence by such artists as Ice-T, Ice Cube, LL Cool J and Lin-Manuel Miranda, among many others.

Williams will direct the musical, with Diaz writing the show’s book, based upon the MGM Motion Picture. Webb (Broadway’s Choir Boy, MJ: The Musical and the upcoming Purple Rain) joins the team as music supervisor, arranger, and orchestrator.

Last month, Nas, Williams, Diaz and Webb collaborated on a 29-hour workshop to develop the stage adaptation. Further details concerning casting and production timeline will be announced in the coming months.

Set in the early 1980s, Beat Street revolves around a group of aspiring young talents in the South Bronx, including a graffiti artist, a DJ, and a break-dancer, as they pursue their dreams in the emerging hip-hop scene while facing the challenges of urban life.

The film was also notable for appearances by major artists of the era, including Doug E. Fresh, DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambataa & The Sonic Force, Us Girls, The Treacherous Three, Magnificent Force, The New York City Breakers, Rock Steady Crew, and Grandmaster Melle Mel & The Furious Five, among others. It was produced by Harry Belafonte and David V. Picker, with music by Belafonte and Arthur Baker, story by Steven Hager, screenplay by Andrew Davis, David Gilbert & Paul Golding, and directed by Stan Lathan, Beat Street starred Rae Dawn Chong, Gus Davis, and Jon Chardiet.

Beat Street on Broadway will be produced by Richard Fearn, Arthur Baker, Michael Holman, and Peter Bittenbender, in association with Mass Appeal. Baker and Holman were producers on the original 1984 film. The wildly successful Beat Street soundtrack, released in two volumes, was produced by Baker, with Volume One cited as one of the first rap albums to be certified gold.

ShowTown Theatricals will serve as General Managers. Nathan Gehan and Jamison Scott of ShowTown Productions are executive producers of Beat Street.

EXCLUSIVE: Creator economy business Motion Society has named former Spotify, Meta and Fullscreen exec Chanel Simmons as its new U.S. boss.

She will become Managing Director, U.S., at the company, which works with around 650 creators and distributes more than 30,000 videos each month, including big names such as Jesser, Stephen Sharer and Lizzy Capri.

Simmons has worked in the creator economy for more than a decade at the likes of digital channels business Fullscreen, Meta and Spotify. At the former, she led on YouTube syndication and then worked on FaZe Clan’s owned channels business and 50-strong creator roster.

She later moved to Meta and then to Spotify, where she worked on digital content partnerships, onboarding creators and helping creator service providers to expand their YouTube video programming to Spotify.

At Motion Society, she’ll be overseeing a content lab business that tests ideas to determine where a piece of content has the best opportunity to cut through. It uses a proprietary operating system to speed up workflows for its 50+ staff. This, in theory, gives them more time to work on creative and strategic plans for Motion Society’s creator partners.

The company uses performance data from platforms to inform its OS, allowing staff to see how thousands of videos have performed on each platform.

“During my time at Spotify, Motion Society consistently stood out,” said Simmons. “The team understood the needs of both creators and platforms and came to us with a deeply informed point of view on how creator content could succeed on Spotify. What impressed me most was the combination of strong creatives, platform expertise and the technology they built that allows their team to focus more time on strategy and the content itself.”

Motion Society was founded in 2022 by Martin Belotti, the creator of LADB Restoration; Thomas Subra, who is CEO; COO Jean-Loup Fraudin; and CPO and engineer Lucas Falga.

Subra, Fraudin and Falga left careers in finance and engineering to build the company with Belotti, and together they later raised seed funding to develop the proprietary operating system that has underpinned their business.

“Motion Society was inspired by a problem I ran into while growing my own channel,” said Belotti. “Even as I reached more than one million subscribers, I was still mostly operating it on my own. I could see more value in the content I had already made, but expanding it across platforms required the time and expertise I didn’t have. I wasn’t willing to give up quality and control of the content just to grow. So we set out to build the partner I had been looking for.”