Motown the Musical
The hits come thick and almost too fast in this high-octane extravaganza
Berry Gordy has a strong claim to be considered the greatest record producer in American popular music history. When he founded the Motown label in the early Sixties, he insisted on the highest standards, based on strict quality control. This wasn’t to be just black music for a black audience; he wanted songs for ‘the blacks, the whites, the Jews, the Gentiles and the cops and robbers’.
The young performers he assembled were talented but short on style. He employed a choreographer to teach sophisticated dance-steps, hand movements and all the artistry of stagecraft. He had groups working on writing and arranging songs, others on production. And what a rollcall of talent Gordy’s little studio in Detroit and later in California produced: Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Mary Wells, The Supremes, The Temptations, and among others, the Jackson Five. Their success is exhilarating considering that when the touring version, Motortown Revue, went on the road initially, they were playing to strictly segregated audiences.
The first thing that hits you in this show is the beautifully lit, seamless precision and style of the song routines, performed in elegant suits, followed by an array of casual costumes Crowning it all is the relentlessly passionate gospel, soul, rhythm and blues sound that made Motown so distinctive.
The sheer attention to detail in the production leaves you gasping. And the power of the songs is still there, including, My Guy, My Girl, Where Did Our Love Go, Stop In The Name of Love, What’s Going On and a bunch of other standards. The programme lists over sixty, some in quickfire snatches; I lost count of the number performed.
It has however the flaw that’s common in this kind of show that depends almost totally on the songs – nothing bad about that – but I found myself wondering early on if it might have been billed as Motown, The Music. The dramatic content is decidedly in the slick tick-the-box style. We get Gordy setting up Motown with a family loan, selecting his performers, regulating behaviour, references to the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations and the Detroit riots, visiting Britain and switching from Detroit to California all with minimum explanation.
The second half goes into slightly more dramatic detail, especially in the relationship with Diana Ross, and with Marvin Gaye — Ross looking for more affection, Gaye getting bolshie, the stars decamping for better contracts, and an element of gloom over Gordy’s (lucrative) sale of Motown in 1988, but the gloom doesn’t last long.
The Gordy/Ross relationship almost gives the impression she was the only female in his life, despite his three wives, various other women and eight children. But the show is written by Gordy, so I suppose you can’t blame him for skipping the personal stuff and sticking to the talent.
I found it slightly chilling to see the young Keiran Edwards lighting up the house with his 10-year-old Michael Jackson act,
‘The sheer attention to detail leaves you gasping. And the power of the songs is still there’
knowing the tragic outcome of that story. And the on-stage audience participation interlude with Karis Anderson’s Diana Ross was cringe-making; Dublin audiences go batty over any mention of Ireland, no matter how banal.
But Edward Baruwa as Gordy leads a stunning cast that will have your brain rattling with those great songs as you leave.