MOTOWN
From the New York Times
The hit parade reels on
seemingly forever in “Motown: The
Musical,” a dramatically slapdash but musically vibrant trip
back to the glory days of Detroit, where the vinyl pouring out of an unassuming
two-story house took the world by storm, all but paving the city’s streets with
gold records.
Before we’ve even settled in our
seats, we’re being dazzled by a sing-off between the
Four Tops and the Temptations. Gladys Knight and the Pips andMarvin Gaye later
tear into their dueling versions of the enduring classic “I Heard It Through
the Grapevine.” (Don’t make me choose, please: I couldn’t live without either.)
Snapping their fingers and smoothly wriggling their hips, Diana Ross and the
Supremes bop through several of their ear-tickling hits.
There’s Smokey Robinson, too,
and Stevie Wonder, Martha and the Vandellas, and Mary Wells. Something close to
rapture spreads through the audience when a magical little dynamo, the young
Michael Jackson, takes the stage, spinning like a tiny top and singing with a
grown man’s soul in his little boy’s voice box.
These performers are obviously
not appearing at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where Broadway’s latest jukebox musical
opened Sunday night. Instead, their indelible styles are being effectively
recreated by a blazing cast of gifted singers impersonating this crowded
pantheon of pop-chart immortals. Our tour guide on this busy joy ride through
the Motor City of the late 1960s and ’70s, and the show’s principal character,
is Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records. Mr. Gordy wrote the book for the
musical (adapted from his 1994 autobiography), and his recollections of the era
and the artists he discovered form the shaky scaffolding for a musical that is,
if nothing else, an efficient endorphin-delivery system for baby boomers.
The story begins at the end, in
1983, when a television
special celebrating the Motown legacy is being prepared as a
disgruntled Berry (Brandon Victor Dixon) broods in his Los Angeles home,
waffling about whether to participate. He’s bruised by the company’s decline,
which has been hastened by the departure of many acts he discovered, groomed
and elevated into stardom. A few left lawsuits behind as parting gifts.
(Although Berry mostly comes across as a heroic figure bordering on saintly, to
Mr. Gordy’s credit — and that of the show’s script consultants, David Goldsmith
and Dick Scanlan — his conflicts with various artists are not entirely scrubbed
from this unofficial record.)
The musical, mechanically
directed by Charles Randolph-Wright,
then flashes back to the beginnings, when a young Berry — Junior to his large,
loyal and loving family — is casting about for a career. A brief stab at boxing
fizzles (cuing one of the show’s few — and unfortunate — original songs), and
soon Berry is calling on his family’s money to back his dream of creating a
record company. He’s already written and sold a couple of songs to Jackie
Wilson (a funny Eric LaJuan Summers), but only by owning publishing rights and
producing records can real money be made.
More than 50 songs (!) are
performed in “Motown,” usually, alas, in truncated versions. Most are simply
presented as concert versions by the actors playing the artists who made them
famous, but a few are shoehorned awkwardly into the story as “book” songs.
Sometimes the fit seems right,
as when Berry serenades his family to the tune of “Money (That’s What I Want),”
best known in the Beatles version.
Elsewhere, the fit is forced, if not ludicrous. “You’re All I Need to Get By”
is performed by Mr. Dixon’s Berry as a duet with Diana Ross (a silky Valisia LeKae)
in which they pledge their love. (Never mind that it was recorded by Gaye and
Tammi Terrell.) Stranger still, after Diana and Berry are found in bed after an
unsuccessful attempt at lovemaking, she leaps up and begins singing “I Hear a
Symphony.” It’s like a parody of a Viagra commercial.
Making way for so much music
means that “Motown” breezily scrimps on storytelling. Characters come and go so
quickly we barely have time to register their famous names, let alone get to
know them. Stevie Wonder is introduced as a talented tyke in Act I but doesn’t
reappear until the second act, fully grown at the keyboards, singing in
Washington to promote the creation of a holiday dedicated to the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (“Damn, our little Stevie, making history,” Berry opines
with cornball sincerity.) The relationship between Berry and Diana moves to the
foreground at various intervals, but even major Motown figures like Smokey
Robinson (Charl Brown) and Gaye (Bryan Terrell Clark) are reduced to making
intermittent cameo appearances.
The dialogue is often
vinyl-stiff, written in a shorthand meant to convey as much story as possible
in as few words as possible. When Florence Ballard begins behaving erratically
with the Supremes, Berry darkly intones: “The pressure of fame is vicious. Not
everyone can go the distance.” Enter Flo’s replacement, Cindy Birdsong, seconds
later. Rather more tastelessly, Gaye makes a brief allusion to his father, at
whose hands he would later die (but not in this upbeat musical, of course).
The telegraphic nature of the
book derives partly from the impossibility of telling the stories of all the
major Motown artists in a single musical. (The Supremes alone inspired their
own musical, “Dreamgirls.”) For a full and coherent history of Mr. Gordy’s
game-changing music factory, you’d need to check out Gerald Posner’s engrossing
book “Motown: Music,
Money, Sex and Power.”
But audiences don’t go to
Broadway musicals to see audiobooks performed live, and few are likely to
complain that “Motown” skimps on what they have come to hear: the sweet stream
of music that fused the soul of rhythm and blues with the ear worm hooks of pop
to create a genre that played a role in America’s changing attitudes toward
race in the 1960s. (Mr. Gordy’s general lack of involvement in politics and his
lifelong focus on business become a little bit blurred here; he comes across as
far more socially engaged than in Mr. Posner’s book.)
The performers put their songs
across with verve and an admirable lack of self-consciousness, given that the
audience is likely to be intimately familiar with every nuance of phrasing from
the original recordings. Ms. LeKae’s cotton-candy voice matches up nicely with
Ms. Ross’s, and she twitches her twiggy frame capably as Diana moves from
awkward teenager to glamorous diva, even if the real Ms. Ross’s metallic edges
— or should I say, as I’m sure she would prefer, the real Miss Ross’s metallic
edges? — have been softened into mohair. As Gaye, Mr. Clarke exudes sexual
magnetism during his brief appearances. Mr. Brown’s honeyed croon replicates
Mr. Robinson’s convincingly, and in the central role of Berry — I’m tempted to
say the only role — Mr. Dixon sings with passionate fervor, although in the
dialogue scenes he’s only as good as his often flat-footed material.
But while the audience lapped
up virtually all of the musical numbers — even Rick James and Teena Marie drop
into the party, briefly and probably unnecessarily — the wildest applause
erupted when Raymond Luke Jr., one of two performers who portray the boyish
Jackson (along with the young Berry and the young Stevie Wonder), came bounding
onstage, exuding the self-confidence and charm of the preternaturally seasoned
performer he’s playing.
For all the richness of its
gold-and-platinum-plated soundtrack, “Motown” would be a much more satisfying
nostalgia trip if Mr. Gordy and his collaborators were more effective curators
of both story and song, rather than trying to encompass the whole of the
label’s fabled history in two and a half hours. Irresistible as much of the
music is, I often had the frustrating impression that I was being forced to
listen to an LP being played at the dizzying, distorting speed of a 45.
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