Too Proud To Beg

[edjames]

Saw an early preview of this new jukebox musical based on the the Motown group, the Temptations.

Based on the biography, of the only surviving member of the original group, founder, Otis Williams, this high powered, high energy, powerhouse musical packs a lot of punch with hit laden musical numbers that topped the charts.

The musical does not delve too deeply into the jealousy, drugs, and sexual antics of this group, and rightfully so, the audience is there to celebrate, not to mourn.

The cast is superb. The guys who portray the group members are excellent. The supporting cast is great.

Simple sets, good costumes, great choreography emulating the signature style of the group, and most importantly a house orchestra that tears the roof off the theater!

I had a great time. Motown music was a big part of the soundtrack of my life.

I thought it interesting that the audience was primarily fifty shades of gray and much older than I would have expected, but they loved it. Everyone around me agreed that it was a terrific musical. A rousing standing O at the end, and we were all sad that the performance was over.

Opens March 21.

[LaffingBear]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTsLaTFm7ro

[foxy]

Saw the show today and really liked it. Recommended.

[bostonman]

Has the show changed names? Or is it still "Ain't Too Proud"?

 

(At least it's not The Temptations: The Musical.)

[+ WilliamM]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTsLaTFm7ro

 

Jeremy Pope was just in another musical Off-Broadway, Chorus Boys. He received excellent reviews.

[bostonman]

Jeremy Pope was just in another musical Off-Broadway, Chorus Boys. He received excellent reviews.

 

Actually, the (Broadway) play with music was called Choir Boy. I guess Chorus Boys is kinda like Too Proud To Beg?

[Cooper]

The name of the show is "Ain't Too Proud" The life and times of The Temptations. There have been several Broadway shows that cover the lives of famous performers, some have succeeded, while others failed. I see this one as a hit.

 

The performance I saw was sold out as word of this show is spreading. It's very lively and entertaining. At times you feel you're at a rock concert. The audience was truly getting into the music and amazing dancing.

 

What I enjoy about shows like these is that the writers take you behind the scenes of their lives, to both the good and bad times. What you see on stage during a concert doesn't necessarily reflect what's going on back stage.

 

Wonderful acting and singing. Thought it was great when the orchestra played the last songs on stage with the actors. The Temptations songs have survived over the years and 27 members have been added to their group.

 

I really enjoyed it.

[edjames]

Great review in today's NYTimes by Ben Brantley:

Review: An All-Star Team in the Temptations Musical ‘Ain’t Too Proud’

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/theater/aint-too-proud-review-the-temptations.html

 

As befits a show about the Temptations, the most infectiously rhythmic of chart-topping R&B groups, “Ain’t Too Proud” keeps time in style. I don’t mean that solely in terms of a beat that makes you feel like dancing.

Of course, as you watch this latest entry in Broadway’s ever-expanding jukebox musical sweepstakes, you will no doubt find your legs twitching, as if from muscle memory. That’s the urge being translated with such sublime grace by those five natty men on the stage, Platonic ideals of stepping high and looking fine.

But it is also true that time, unforgiving and unstoppable, is cannily presented as the shaping element in “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” which opened on Thursday under the shrewd direction of Des McAnuff, with sensational choreography by Sergio Trujillo. As the show charts the changing fortunes of men who became synonymous with Motown’s glory days, the years keep moving forward with the relentlessness of a conveyor belt in an auto-making assembly line.

It’s enough to wear a strong man down. And more than any of the (oh so many) pop-songbook shows that have befallen Broadway since the Abba-spouting behemoth “Mamma Mia!” opened in 2001, “Ain’t Too Proud” is a story of attrition. We watch as the core lineup of the original Temptations is whittled down to the last man standing. That’s the group’s leader and show’s narrator, Otis Williams, played with anchoring gravity by Derrick Baskin.

Ultimately, though, it’s the music that’s the sole survivor. And that’s what’s being celebrated here — the collective miracle of a blissfully silken sound forged out of clashing egos, many misfires and life-wrecking hard work into numbers that keep playing in our memories.

While honoring all the expected biomusical clichés, which include rolling out its subjects’ greatest hits in brisk and sometimes too fragmented succession, this production refreshingly emphasizes the improbable triumph of rough, combustible parts assembled into glistening smoothness.

Dominique Morisseau, who wrote the show’s book, is the gifted author of a cycle of smart, tough-minded plays based in her native Detroit, where much of “Ain’t Too Proud” is also set. Her script, adapted from Otis Williams’s 1988 memoir, reminds us that the Detroit-based Motown Records — the crossover label run by Berry Gordy (Jahi Kearse) that revolutionized pop music — was indeed a factory of sorts, one that rigorously processed and refined raw talent for mass consumption.

This means that unlike such current fare as “Beautiful” (about Carole King), and “The Cher Show,” “Ain’t Too Proud” isn’t focused on a single star, with the attendant by-the-numbers psychology. Instead, we have a study in group dynamics, in which the balance shifts in ways big and small, as the component parts keep changing.

 

As Otis observes early on, after the firing of the group’s original lead singer, Al Bryant (Jarvis B. Manning Jr.), “Sometimes Temp stood for temporary.” This sense of interchangeability (and expendability) is given witty visual life in the second act, when a cavalcade of identically dressed Temptations, past and present fills the front of the stage. (Paul Tazewell did the delicious costumes.)

Not that the audience is ever likely to confuse one Temp for another. The five-member group that most people know as the Temptations is embodied with piquantly detailed individuality by charismatic, supple-voiced actors who astutely convey the imbalanced equations of ego and accommodation in their characters.

They are, in addition to Mr. Baskin, James Harkness (as Paul Williams), Jawan M. Jackson (as a Melvin Franklin who talks as well as sings in a thundering bass), Jeremy Pope (late of “Choir Boy,” who here plays Eddie Kendricks) and a smoking hot Ephraim Sykes (as David Ruffin). We meet them first as a team, singing “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” the Temptations hit from 1964, before Otis shepherds us back to the group’s starting point.

That segue follows the formula established by “Jersey Boys,” the long-running Broadway hit from 2005 about the Four Seasons, also directed by Mr. McAnuff and generally considered the gold standard for jukebox biographies. (It has been reincarnated Off Broadway at New World Stages.) Like “Jersey Boys,” “Ain’t Too Proud” rapidly follows a fairly straightforward timeline through some pretty rough terrain.

So in addition to seeing the Temps on (and back) stage, and in the recording studio — with mentors that include Smokey Robinson (Christian Thompson) and Norman Whitfield (Mr. Manning) — we are given quick-sketch glimpses of the grim personal and social problems that derail them. (Robert Brill’s set, lighted by Howell Binkley with projections by Peter Nigrini, neatly balances grit and glamour throughout.)

Some of these synoptic moments can seem bizarrely perfunctory, as in a crack-smoking sequence and, worse, a party scene that portrays Ruffin’s abusive relationship with the singer Tammi Terrell (Nasia Thomas). And the attempts to portray the dawning social consciences of the singers — who became famous at the height of the civil rights movement — can feel strained. (On the other hand, I enjoyed the brief encounters with the women in the men’s lives, including the Supremes, led by Candice Marie Woods in a pitch-perfect evocation of Diana Ross, and Rashidra Scott makes the most of her onstage time as Otis’s neglected wife, Josephine.)

Mercifully, the show mostly avoids the usual jukebox pitfall of jimmying in songs to reflect the plot in literal ways. Instead, the musical numbers generally register as a rippling, liquid mirror of societal and personal flux, especially in the ways they show the Temptations’ sound being calibrated to suit a mainstream (i.e., white) audience.

As for the performance of those songs, orchestrated by Harold Wheeler with musical direction and arrangements by Kenny Seymour, they’re pretty close to perfection. They’re not entirely mimetic, which is a relief.

These Temps (whose later additional members are ably incarnated by Saint Aubyn, E. Clayton Cornelious and Mr. Thompson) sound enough like their prototypes to satisfy hard-core fans. But the fabulous standards, which include “Cloud Nine” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” have been reimagined with a heightened Broadway flair that stops short of pandering.

This is especially true of the sinuous synchronicity of Mr. Trujillo’s choreography, in which everyone is often doing the same moves, but with a subtle, stylish edge that sets each member apart. (Or not so subtle, though still highly stylish, in the case of Mr. Sykes’s spectacular scissor splits.) You’re always aware of the component parts in this well-oiled music machine.

As its title suggests, “Ain’t Too Proud” promotes the virtue of humility, at least when it comes to keeping a team together. But it also makes sure that these men never become ciphers. The happy paradox of this group portrait is that everybody gets to be a star.

[edjames]

On the other hand, the NYPost was not so kind....

Temptations’ music elevates by-the-numbers ‘Ain’t Too Proud'

https://nypost.com/2019/03/21/temptations-music-elevates-by-the-numbers-aint-too-proud/

 

Get ready — here they come!

“Ain’t Too Proud” arrived on Broadway Thursday night buoyed by a surge of nostalgia and a slew of Motown hits. But anyone who’s seen the earlier jukebox shows “Jersey Boys” or “Motown: The Musical” is bound to feel a dull sense of déja vu.

Subtitled “The Life and Times of the Temptations” and woven with golden oldies like “Get Ready,” “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)” and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” the show is based on a book by Otis Williams, the R&B supergroup’s founder — and its last living original member. While “ATP” packs some terrific performances, it’s a paint-by-numbers evening.

The story traces the Detroit band’s rise to fame and its personal and political conflicts, which unfold efficiently, if mechanically, in an “and then we did this” fashion. Williams (Derrick Baskin) narrates and introduces fellow Temps. There’s his neighbor (no relation) Paul Williams (James Harkness), Melvin Franklin (Jawan M. Jackson), Eddie Kendricks (the phenomenal Jeremy Pope) and David Ruffin (Ephraim Sykes).

Dominique Morisseau’s script essentially gives each man one main trait: Paul has the slick dance moves, Ruffin’s the one “addicted to the worst drug of all — the spotlight,” and so on. The women in their lives, either abused or left behind, hug the sidelines. Motown music mogul Berry Gordy appears now and then to act as the Temps’ Svengali.

The thrill is watching the Temptations find their collective voice, tight harmonies and moves. “The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts,” Williams likes to say, and it’s true. When the group’s performing “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” on “American Bandstand” and “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” with the Supremes on an NBC special, or mourning the death of Dr. Martin Luther King in “I Wish It Would Rain” (a dramatic turn that helps establish an otherwise vague timeline), the songs light up the stage.

That’s a good thing, since much of the production is drenched in gray. A lesson in the power of humor from “The Cher Show” could help.

 

A big plus is Sergio Trujillo’s choreography, with its dazzling spins and splits and piston-precise steps. But a fog of familiarity hangs over Des McAnuff’s staging: The director of the hit “Jersey Boys” and the miss “Summer” relies on his usual go-to tricks: kinetic characters, concert lighting, scrolling graphics, bare stage. And things get somber very quickly after Ruffin’s expulsion from the group.

“Ain’t Too Proud” is a polished tribute ride to an act that keeps on going, albeit with different singers: Williams notes there have been 24 Temps since the early ’60s, when the group started. Proud this show is — but distinctive, it ain’t.

[edjames]

Opening Night was scary!

 

‘Ain’t Too Proud’ preview features flying vomit, broken seat

 

It was a wild night at Tuesday’s “Ain’t Too Proud”preview.

The critics were in the house for the new The Temptations musical, so the producers and creators were on edge. They almost fainted when Washington Post critic Peter Marks took his aisle seat and it collapsed. The house crew rushed to repair it before curtain.

Marks tweeted: “The saying ‘Please take your seat’ acquired new meaning at the Imperial Theatre … Mine fell apart.”

There was another commotion during the first act, when Michael David, the Tony-winning producer of “Jersey Boys,” jumped out of his seat and ran up the aisle, followed by his wife and some of their friends.

It turned out that an ailing theatergoer in the first row of the mezzanine vomited all over them.

A Tony voter watching the scene unfold said, “If only the culprit had turned to the right, he would have hit a good deal of the New York Drama Critics Circle.”

The ushers moved in and covered the seats with plastic wrapping. The wardrobe department also snapped into gear, outfitting David and his party with “Ain’t Too Proud” merchandise. When they returned to their seats they were wearing “My girl, my girl, my girl” T-shirts.