Motor city musical is totally supreme
WHEN it comes to finding the music for a stage show, there are few more bountiful sources than the entire back catalogue of Motown Records. From The Temptations and The Four Tops to Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and the Jackson 5 the label had more than 100 US top 10 hits in the 1960s.
Nobody knows better than Berry Gordy the value of the songs by these stars — in fact, he wrote more than 250 of them himself.
Having started out in the automotive industry in Detroit, he believed he could set up an ‘assembly line’ for music — start with the raw artists, add a song, a backing group and some arrangement, and produce a hit at the end of it.
He was eventually proven right in ways not even he could have imagined. Ably assisted by Smokey Robinson, also one of his biggest stars, the motto of the label became ‘The sound of young America’, and that’s exactly what it was. So it’s hardly surprising that in Motown: The Musical he has found a way to further make these songs work for him. As a producer of the show, he has ensured two things: his music is enduring longer and the story is told his way.
Many of the stars who worked with Motown had various disagreements with Gordy down the years and many of them are worked through in the musical, but all with the premise that they weren’t Gordy’s fault, that he only wanted the best for his artists. And that may be true, but it all feels a little sanitised.
The breakdown of his relationship with Diana Ross is also portrayed as something that happened purely because he loved her so much and worked so hard to only get the best for her. Again, perhaps true, but he must take some of the blame.
Outside of this nitpicking with the storyline, it is an uptempo, toe-tapping riot of hit after hit. It is interwoven with historical events that shaped how the artists and the label were perceived, including race riots and the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, events which had far-reaching consequences for black artists at the time.
The audience become part of the show and were clapping and singing along throughout — watch out for some particularly memorable on-stage participation — and the finale is wonderfully interspersed with real-life footage from the 25 years of Motown extravaganza.
Huge shoutouts must go to Edward Baruwa as Gordy, Karis Anderson as Ross, Nathan Lewis as Smokey and Shak GabbidonWilliams as Marvin Gaye.
There shouldn’t be a mountain high enough to keep you from getting to this.