Last night, I took Amber to see Ain't Too Proud, a new musical that's playing downtown at the Ahmanson. It's here through the end of September then it goes to Toronto for a while. I don't know where it goes from there except that it's supposed to open at the Imperial Theatre, which is a Broadway house, some time next Spring. It will probably run there for quite some time.
It's the story of The Temptations, arguably the best group ever to perform the kind of music they performed. Frankly, the story of their rise to fame and the conflicts that came with it is probably unremarkable among musical groups. Was there ever an act that lasted for some time that didn't have problems with drinking and drugs? Where someone didn't accidentally get someone pregnant? Where egos didn't clash because somebody thought they were a bigger star than someone else? Maybe Tony Orlando and Dawn managed to avoid most of that but not a lot of other groups.
You also may know the story from a TV mini-series some years back but so what? You don't go to shows like this for the story so much as to see it told well, integrated with songs you know and love. Ain't Too Proud is full of classic fave tunes and judging from the reviews I've read (and some conversations I overheard last night), the big complaint is that most of them are frustratingly truncated. Personally, I would have traded a scene of Otis (the group's organizer) arguing with his wife about being away so much for the rest of "Get Ready."
The cast members do a generally good job of replicating the sounds we know from the records. In the lobby, I heard snatches of a debate that roughly went "The guy who sang lead on this song wasn't as good as the guy on the record," "Yeah, but the guy who sang this other song was better than the guy on the record." Special attention must be paid to an actor named Derrick Baskin. He plays Otis and he deserves some sort of Tony Award not just for doing it well but for sheer manpower. He's on stage almost the entire show, leaping from narration to playing scenes to singing and dancing. Some of that Temptations choreography looks pretty damned exhausting.
Oh, and by the way: The show also features reasonable facsimiles of Diana Ross and the Supremes, Tammi Terrell, Smokey Robinson and other Motown names. Another of course is Berry Gordy, who doesn't come off in this show nearly as well as he did in Motown, which he wrote himself.
Obviously, this is the kind of show where someone worked backwards from the premise. They decided that a musical of songs that The Temptations sang would resonate with the demographic that goes to shows like this (Jersey Boys, Motown, Smokey Joe's Cafe, etc.) and they're right. Amber and I liked it a lot and if we did, the odds are good that you will, too.