By JOE LAPOINTE
NEW YORK – Mix great songs with great voices. Add sublime dance moves, imaginatively choreographed and perfectly synchronized. Blend in flashy clothes and hairstyles with a progressive social attitude and what do you get?
Motown, a Detroit musical success story, as we remember it from the 1960s and 1970s.
Presumably, a half-century later, these repackaged ingredients – with the personal backstory written by founder and former chairman Berry Gordy – should add up to one great Broadway musical, right?
Uh, no, not quite.
Instead, “Motown: The Musical” – which opened Sunday night before a star-studded audience at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre – might be one of those mega-productions whose financial success exceeds its artistic merit.
Although “Motown” has a few transcendent moments, the show does not, overall, equal the potential sum of its parts. In a recent interview with CBS about his career, Gordy said: “I took some risks and they all paid off, big-time. I mean, really big time.”
Unfortunately, this show might not be one of those big-time payoffs, unless defined narrowly as a reported $16 million in advance sales. “Motown” lacks the tight, narrative trajectory of “Jersey Boys,” the current king of Broadway’s jukebox musicals, with a run that began in 2005.
To be sure, the timing for “Motown” is good. The brand never really goes out of fashion. Just a few months ago, Paul McCartney financed the restoration of the broken Steinway piano at Detroit’s “Hitsville, U.S.A.” museum on West Grand Boulevard.
In New York, uptown in Harlem, the off-Broadway play “Detroit ‘67” – by Detroiter Dominique Morisseau – effectively uses much Motown music to evoke the year of the Riot/Rebellion in the Motor City. And nobody ever forgets the words to “My Girl.”
Reliving Musical Memories
With much national media hype for “Motown” and a commercial tie-in with Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” campaign, the new show arrives as auto companies again prosper and empty-nested Baby Boomers have time and money to relive their musical youth. So far, so good.
But it is too bad so many songs in “Motown” are truncated and surrounded by excessive stage gimmickry. Furniture slides back and forth and even walls of rooms disappear. These dazzling spins intrude on the mood of the music, perhaps to disguise the tepid script.
As a timeline, we get videotape of Walter Cronkite announcing President Kennedy’s assassination. It comes shortly before the emotional peak of the show, before intermission, with the death of Dr. Martin Luther King and a moving performance of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”
This gives the audience false hope for the weaker Act II, built flimsily around the framing device of Gordy’s purported reluctance to attend the television special celebrating Motown’s 25th. anniversary because so many artists have left him.
Even Gordy, the centrifugal force of the plot, seems sketched lightly in pencil. The unfortunate Brandon Victor Dixon plays Gordy as if he doesn’t quite buy into the character who wrote a script about himself that doesn’t always add up.
Bryan Terrell Clark portrays Marvin Gaye.
“You con everybody,” a militant Gaye (Bryan Terrell Clark) tells Gordy. Until now, little in the script has suggested anything shady about Gordy’s business practices or resentment of his artists.
This void allows Charl Brown to steal scenes as a more convincing, better-rounded Smokey Robinson, whose singing, writing and producing made him arguably Motown’s greatest talent.
The Diva and the Boss
And the scene many people will remember shows Gordy and Diana Ross (Valisia LeKae) in bed after his failure on their first attempt at sex.
“That was the most embarrassing thing in my life,” Gordy recently told CBS. Why he insisted on including it in the show (as well as in a book) is mystifying. Perhaps, on stage, he was trying to pump verisimilitude into a shallow plot.
LeKae plays Ross as a talented diva with a big-eyed smile, angelic voice and convenient hots for the boss. The show gets a little churchy when she sings “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand” and urges the theatre patrons to link fingers and sing along.
Moments like these remind us that Motown, even in its prime, was sometimes faulted for producing sweet pop confections, its tightly programmed artists (or their material) lacking the “soul” quality of Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Otis Redding.
But that is a quibble and all this is not to say “Motown: The Musical” is without great moments. Another musical peak comes with back-to-back renditions of “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” first by Gladys Knight and the Pips, next by Gaye.
Progressive Undercurrents
These startlingly different versions scratch the nostalgia itch, as does another resonant moment showing the Gordy family gathered around the radio to cheer heavyweight champion Joe Louis over Nazi Germany’s Max Schmeling in 1938.
To be sure, the scene is a cliché in works of art about African-Americans of that era. But here, it rings true as the ringside bell. “I want to be Joe Louis,” young Gordy tells his father, who says there’s only one Joe Louis so go be the best Berry Gordy you can be.
Saycon Sengbloh (center) fills the role of Martha Reeves.
This progressive undercurrent is underscored again in a cartoonish but plausible scene down South when two scowling white cops struggle to keep teenagers apart in the “White” and “Colored” sections of a theater during the “Motortown Revue.”
“Colored people, white people,” Ross later tells Gordy, “enjoying themselves together!”
Audiences of all races reacted enthusiastically at previews to the child Michael Jackson character played by either Raymond Luke, Jr. or Jibreel Mawry. But stretching the script’s time frame to include the Jackson era forces too many years over too few minutes, although – at close to three hours – the show’s later pace drags.
Although reasonably entertaining, it’s unfortunate that “Motown: The Musical” doesn’t quite do justice to Motown, the music, or to its founder. Just as Henry Ford changed the world by putting it on spinning car wheels, so too did Gordy change the culture with .45 r.p.m. vinyl records spinning on turntables.
Like the boxer Louis, Ford and Gordy were among the most significant Detroiters of the 20th. Century. Some day, like the other two, Gordy will merit a bronze statue in his home city. Perhaps by then we also might see and hear a musical worthy of Gordy’s proven business acumen, his undeniable historical stature and his artistic genius.
Joe Lapointe is a New York University journalism instructor and former New York Times reporter.
