Life
Theatre review: Ain't Too Proud - Temptations reign supreme
Joyfully told story of Motown band in musical packed with brilliantly performed songs won't disappoint fans
April 20, 2023 09:43
2 min read
Joyfully told story of Motown band in musical packed with brilliantly performed songs won't disappoint fans
April 20, 2023 09:43Ain’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.
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.
A Supremes number in Ain't Too Proud To Beg (Johan Persson)
