Ain’t Too Proud
Prince Edward Theatre | ★★★★✩
There will always be a case to place the back catalogue show a rung or three below the kind of musical that boasts an original score.
But this latest in the biographical genre, which moves through the life and times of The Temptations with the unstoppable momentum of a travelator, offers much more than the chart hits that formed the soundtrack for a generation.
To begin with there is an authority to this Detroit story written by playwright Dominique Morisseau, a daughter of that city, who bases her script on the memoir by original Temptation Otis Williams, here also the show’s narrator played by a commanding Sifiso Mazibuko.
AIN-T TOO PROUD credit Johan Persson (14)
A dance scene in Ain't Too Proud Too Beg (Johan Persson)
So although Morisseau’s book pays tribute to the hit machine honed under the focus of Motown Records’ Berry Gordy (Akmed Junior Khemalai) it doesn’t romanticise it.
True, as America was gripped by the convulsions of the civil rights struggle The Temptations deployed their slick harmonies to produce some of the finest protest songs ever recorded.
These include War before Edwin Starr made it a hit. But only after Gordy refused to release it as a single lest the song distracted from the “crossover” appeal that allowed black artists to conquer a music industry, and society, brimful of racism.
To Gordy The Temptations are business first and foremost. And when the band’s success is threatened by drift (though not The Drifters), drugs and discord, he brings on board the group’s first non-African American manager, Shelly Berger (Dylan Turner), who declares he is Jewish when a Temptation complains that he is white.
It is startling to learn that during their lifetime Otis is the one constant among a total of 27 members of the five-man group.
He is the first and last man standing over the decades during which temptation not only gave its name to the group but to the reasons — including sex and drugs — that nearly destroyed it. The focus, however, is very much on the “foundation” Williams formed in 1960.
AIN-T TOO PROUD credit Johan Persson (3)
A Supremes number in Ain't Too Proud To Beg (Johan Persson)
He pulls the five-strong talent together little a little like the way The Magnificent Seven are formed. From the bass baritone of Melvin Franklin (Cameron Bernard Jones) to the sweet falsetto highs of Eddie Kendricks (Mitchell Zhangazha) individual talent found on Detroit’s streets or on the city’s stages is melded into a group whose genius was inevitably greater than the sum of its parts.
The same could be said of the Des McAnuff’s production. Building on his experience directing that other biographical hit about The Fours Seasons, Jersey Boys, this show is slicker and faster.
Robert Brill’s design sets the action against monochrome projections of Detroit and newspaper typography locating the show’s periods and places.
The evening’s thrills, however — and there are many — are largely thanks to Sergio Trujillo’s drilled choreography that may be inspired by The Temptations’ on stage synchronicity but takes it several levels higher.
Tosh Wanogho-Maud as the group’s bespectacled mercurial ego David Ruffin is outstanding, often singing at full pelt while holding a muscle-burning poise.
Kyle Cox, meanwhile, as the group’s dance captain Paul Williams is often the quietest yet most mesmerising presence, only ever showing an ease where the moves for must be a strain. And perhaps most clever of all is that the Motown score is used more like the incidental music in a movie than a gig.
Temptations fans will not be disappointed. But crucially, such is the standard reached by all the disciplines of musical theatre here, nor will traditional fans of the form.
