Temptin' Temptations

’AIN’T TOO PROUD’ TAKES ITS TRANSATLANTIC TRIP

Fourteen years have passed since Broadway producer Ira Pittelman closed a deal for the theatrical rights to the music and life story of the Temptations. It took another eight for the result – Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations – to make a well-received stage debut in Berkeley, California, followed by runs in regional North American cities.

      Next Friday, March 21, will mark exactly four years since the show’s opening night on the Great White Way. And next Thursday, March 20, will see the opening night of Ain’t Too Proud in London, after three weeks of previews.

      It has been, as they say, quite a journey.

      The primary beneficiary of the musical’s acclaim and commercial success has been Otis Williams, the only surviving original member of the Temptations. In fact, his understandably-subjective take on the group which he co-founded has, over the past 35 years, enjoyed three remarkable bites of the cherry: firstly, an autobiography, written with Patricia Romanowski, followed by a two-part TV dramatization, and then Ain’t Too Proud.

      Williams’ book, Temptations, was initially published in 1988. The NBC-TV miniseries, entitled The Temptations, followed in 1998. And the stage show began to take shape in the hands of Pittelman and his fellow producer, Tom Hulce, in 2009.

      All the while, Williams has sustained the Temptations as a consistent performing and recording entity. Tonight, for example, they are scheduled to appear at the American Music Theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And two nights after Ain’t Too Proud formally debuts in London, the group is set to play the Holland Performing Arts Center in Omaha.

      In at least one respect, he and Smokey Robinson have much in common, continuing to attract and delight audiences on the concert circuit while maintaining a public profile in defiance of their years (the Temptation is 82, the former Miracle 83). Just recently, Williams was interviewed by Britain’s The Times, Robinson by The Wall Street Journal. The natural tendency is to talk about their past, compounded – in the case of the full-page Journal piece – by an interviewer who seemed content to accept familiar, well-worn anecdotes and angles. Even the unpleasant title of his forthcoming album didn’t seem to inspire the newspaper to ask Robinson anything substantial about modern music-making.

      However, he did reveal news of a sort to Rolling Stone last month: that he’s “in the process of” making a biopic. First, it was to have been a miniseries – presumably for one of the streaming services – but that has now evolved into a movie. “But the two biopics that I would like mine to come up to are Ray and The Temptations,” said Robinson. The latter, he added, was “one of the greatest biopic miniseries that’s ever been done.”

MOTOWN’S ‘MEMORY-STROKING’ GROOVES

      Whether that’s true or not, the TV two-parter hewed closely to Williams’ memoir. He and manager Shelly Berger were co-producers for Suzanne de Passe’s entertainment company; the film was directed by Allan Arkush. It received mostly glowing reviews, as well as an Emmy award for Arkush, and – perhaps most importantly – strong audience ratings for NBC.

      The Knight-Ridder newspaper chain’s reviewer called the miniseries “an entertaining, bittersweet blast from Detroit’s past…drenched in the memory-stroking grooves of Motown.” Variety hailed thespian Leon Robinson’s turn as David Ruffin, in particular, and advised that “the acting throughout more than makes up for script flaws.” Most of the negative commentary focused on the fact that The Temptations was filmed in Pittsburgh. “I love Detroit,” de Passe said at the time. “But it’s burned out, kind of. There’s not that wonderful 1950s texture. Things are boarded up. Neighbourhoods are gone.”

      She did not endear herself to Motor City citizens on that occasion.

      Whether movie or miniseries, whether based on his 1989 autobiography or not, Smokey Robinson’s biopic will have challenges of its own – but certainly no shortage of extraordinary songs seared timelessly into the world’s memory banks. That remains the major strength of Ain’t Too Proud, too, wherever it’s performed. The crowd at one of this month’s previews at London’s Prince Edward Theatre sang along to many of the hits, and their appreciation was tangible as well as audible.

      If the local cast doesn’t quite have the height of the original Temptations, they have Sergio Trujillo’s evocative choreography down pat. The voices are a reasonable facsimile of the Motown quintet, with the voice of Michael James Stewart noteworthy as Elbridge “Al” Bryant (and later doubling as a non-singing Norman Whitfield).

      Motown has a special place in British hearts, of course, even though the Temptations earned fewer U.K. Top 10 singles and albums than, say, the Four Tops. The Prince Edward has a seating capacity of 1,700, compared to the 1,400 of the Shaftesbury Theatre, where Motown The Musical played from February 2016 to April 2019. At present, the London production of Ain’t Too Proud is taking bookings for the next six months, so its longer-term outlook won’t be known for a while.

      On Broadway, Motown The Musical ran for a little under two years, from April 2013 to January 2015, with 762 performances and gross ticket sales of $116 million. Ain’t Too Proud, opening in March 2019, turned in 485 Broadway performances and grossed $84 million, but was forced as a result of COVID-19 to close prematurely in January 2022. One of the latter show’s co-producers, Loraine Alterman Boyle – a onetime Detroit Free Press journalist who covered Motown extensively during the 1960s – told me that there had been hopes for a longer run, absent the pandemic. (Other Broadway shows of the time were also damaged.) That said, the Ain’t Too Proud touring edition continues to magnetise audiences across the United States, and is booked into theatres there for another year.

      The success of the show also serves as a reminder of Motown’s achievements as a positive, integrating force in music, popular culture and society as a whole. The responsibility of reflecting that in Ain’t Too Proud largely fell to Detroit-born Dominique Morisseau, who wrote its script, based on Williams’ book. She has become one of the most highly-regarded playwrights of recent years, not least for her Detroit ‘67 drama, first produced in 2013.

      “Crossover comes at a cost,” Morisseau told Playbill when Ain’t Too Proud opened at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre. “Think about what it means to tell a bunch of black men that the only real way for them to make real money and be successful is to be accepted in a white community. That it’s not good enough to only appeal to their own community. It means you have to change and quiet and tame some parts of what you are.”

      It would be instructive to hear Berry Gordy’s response to such an opinion, given how he and his pioneering business navigated notions of “crossover” and created global stars who were defined – first and foremost – by their music. In the meantime, the response of British audiences (and critics) to Ain’t Too Proud should be illuminating.

Music notes: the original Broadway cast recording of Ain’t Too Proud is available on streaming services, but the soundtrack of The Temptations is not. Most of the latter’s contents were the group’s original Motown recordings, plus a then-new Smokey Robinson song, “Be Careful What You Wish For.” That is rather good, so its absence is a shame. As for Otis Williams, his memoir is available as an audio book via Audible and in a Kindle edition.