Stratford is revelling in the street smell of success

I doubt Richard Rodgers will turn in his grave because MC Skolla has remixed his music

Philip Hedley is one of the great figures in British theatre. As the artistic director of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in London, one of his biggest achievements has been championing the work of black and Asian actors and writers and attracting ethnically diverse audiences. When he first joined the pioneering Theatre Royal 30 years ago, he got a job as assistant to the late and revered Joan Littlewood. Interviewing the young Hedley, she expounded her own philosophy, telling him the best place to make one's foundation. "I found my life on the rock of change," she told him.

It's advice that Hedley has followed. Over the years he has maintained Stratford's reputation for both innovative productions and for bringing in new audiences, despite receiving inadequate funding from the Arts Council. Now there is a new Hedley venture that would have delighted his radical mentor.

He is presenting at the theatre Da Boyz, an updated, hip hop version of Rodgers and Hart's 1938 hit The Boys from Syracuse. That is rather more of a feat than it sounds. People on both sides of the Atlantic who have had dealings with the estates of the composers know that updated versions of their classic musicals are not agreed to lightly.

Hedley may have partly won the day by arguing that The Boys from Syracuse was itself an updating of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors which also was an adaptation of a much older work. But it seems the argument that really struck home was Hedley's conviction that the musicals' canon does not contain the music of the streets, the music that really excites potential inner-city audiences.

We'll see how right he is when the show opens next month. Usually he gets it right. It was Hedley, after all, who first staged Five Guys Named Mo at Stratford East before Cameron Mackintosh brought it to the West End. I doubt Richard Rodgers will be turning in his grave because his music has been sampled and remixed by DJ Excalibah, who will DJ on stage, and MC Skolla from the hip hop duo Dirty Diggers and interpreted on stage by artists such as Kyza, Kat and Mystro.

Certainly, Mary Rodgers, his daughter, was taken with the idea of introducing her father's work to a new generation. And Mark Rowles, who chairs the Richard Rodgers Centenary Committee, says: "You haven't heard 'This Can't Be Love' until you've heard it rapped." Hedley adds: "I can see rap as being like blank verse, and it has just as many rules as blank verse."

I was certainly wowed when I visited the theatre to watch part of a rehearsal. The young performers, giving it their all, managed a synthesis of rock concert and Broadway musical.

But I feel a twinge, actually two twinges, of anxiety. The first is that I wonder why it needs to be one of the big Broadway musicals that is given the hip hop treatment. If conventional musical theatre isn't reaching the young then why not commission a brand new musical, rather than give a hip hop treatment to a classic? There must be plenty of budding composers out there.

The second, bigger twinge is that I feel theatre often risks becoming patronising to those very people by assuming that they won't be interested in musical classics, but will watch them only if they are interpreted in the music of the clubs and the argot of the street. Why should that be? Surely, one of the great characteristics of music at the moment is the hunger for diversity of styles, from hip hop to guitar bands. But if Philip Hedley has a hunch then it's usually worth backing. I'd just implore him that if he does succeed in winning a new, enthusiastic audience with Da Boyz, then please market to them a diverse range of theatre. The garage version of My Fair Lady can wait till next year.

¿ Houston, she nearly had a problem. The top American soprano Renée Fleming is making her debut as Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata with Houston Grand Opera. Perhaps unwisely, she gave an interview to Associated Press saying she would prefer the critics stay away, adding: "I don't want anybody to come – that's why I'm doing it in Houston." AP stories are received by all major newspapers including the Houston Chronicle, which accused the diva of appearing to brand Houston a "cultural backwater". Fleming said she made the statement "jokingly", and blamed "anxiety" for her remarks.

"It's in my nature to joke when I have some anxiety, and do I have some anxiety? You bet I do," she said. "That's why I'm thrilled to be doing my first Traviata in an atmosphere of warmth and love with such a major company." I call that a pretty good recovery.

¿ Harold Pinter's warnings against the dangers of Americanisation have not, it seems, been heeded by the producers of his new work at the Tricycle theatre in London. Newspapers reviewing the adaptation of Pinter's The Dwarfshave been sent a missive reminding them that Bloomberg is the sponsor, and that this "should be acknowledged" in all reviews.

d.lister@independent.co.uk