Get ready: The Temptations musical comes home
When those buoyant chords and heavenly harmonies ease in, the legally required response is a great big dopey grin.
There’s no point in resisting, even if for some ungodly reason you wanted to. The fly blazers and silky dance moves come next, marrying a visual assault of charm, cool and pulchritude to a musical one.
Against the multi-front campaign of the Temptations, we are all defenseless. Any passing familiarity with R&B history makes this situation instantly clear, but “Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations” epitomizes one essential function of the jukebox musical: The form allows fans to come together and absorb the full wallop of a group’s achievements at once and as one. For Americans, it’s a way we
canonize our musical saints; having a musical written about you is now a next step after getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (which the Temptations joined in 1989).
For Bay Area audiences, the national tour, whose local run opened Thursday, Nov. 10, at BroadwaySF’s Golden Gate Theatre, offers another, more particular satisfaction. The show premiered here in 2017, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, before transferring to Broadway and earning 12 Tony nominations, winning one award. To see the show again is to feel that a native son who’s made good has come home.
Dominique Morisseau’s book retraces a narrative arc etched so deeply by VH1’s “Behind the Music” as to become default, even trite and inescapable. There are the scrappy beginnings, this time on Detroit street corners, where an enterprising Otis Williams (Marcus Paul James) hustles down potential bandmates, giving the hilarious impression that you couldn’t throw a stone in the Motor City in the 1960s without hitting a future superstar. Then there’s rocketing to the R&B stratosphere, with hits including “My Girl” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” made indelible by the gritty lead vocals of David Ruffin (Elijah Ahmad Lewis). Next, inevitably, come the standard plagues of stardom — substance abuse, egos and jealousies — followed by redemption.
This well-trod path can breed sentimentality, especially toward the end of the show, when James’ Otis as narrator delivers all his lines as an old man on his deathbed trying to wheeze out one last word of wisdom.
Uneven vocals also mar the proceedings. While Brett Michael Lockley as Al Bryant has a glissando-ready range that seems to burst outward in three dimensions, other performers
“Ain’t Too Proud” epitomizes one essential function of the jukebox musical: The form allows fans to come together and absorb the full wallop of a group’s achievements.
rasp on high notes or twiddle their way through like they’re still at rehearsal, preserving their voices for later.
Much else in Des McAnuff ’s direction compensates, though, especially Sergio Trujillo’s choreography. Arms chugga-chugga and yank train whistles. Steps strut, as if all of life were a fashion runway. Kicks could pop joints. Individual characters add little flourishes, and not just David Ruffin’s famous splits and microphone tosses. They mime confirming their good looks in a compact mirror. They slick sweat off their brows. They’re bowled over, racked, by the high notes of their own falsettos. Every move has some extra snap or sizzle, like an elastic cord stretched beyond taut. Moves are covertly, not overtly, sexual, because they’re not literal or vulgar; it’s more that group members execute every hand motion, as one line says, as if they’re touching a woman’s body.
You can track whole tides in Black history just through Charles G. LaPointe’s hair and wig design, which goes from conk to Afro, or from the introduction of bell bottoms in Paul Tazewell’s costume design, which feels like a small revolt against Motown Records’ sad but pragmatic insistence that the group present a clean-cut look, the better not to frighten white audiences.
While the Berkeley Rep version of the show emphasized the tragedy that such talent simply couldn’t keep churning out hits forever, what comes across more acutely this time is conflicting visions of brotherhood: a tough-loving brother’s keeper versus a turn-the-other-cheek defender.
Among this cast, which also stars Jalen Harris as Eddie Kendricks, James T. Lane as Paul Williams and Harrell Holmes Jr. as Melvin Franklin, the love is sometimes so palpable that you almost expect them to embrace and kiss. That choice adds more stakes to each explosion, even each bit of rising tension. Call it earned sentiment or cheese that works exactly the way it’s supposed to.