“Motown The Musical” opened on Broadway on April 11th, the story of Berry Gordy set to music for two and a half hours, and while the show is a mammoth hit ticket sales wise, it got pasted by the critics.
Couldn’t be the music, you thinking? Yeah, the book is slim as hell and the music is overstuffed with 50 songs.
But I haven’t bothered with it at all because the bottomline remains that the Motown hits are so well known, any versions of it at all are simply Karaoke. That is all they are. They can’t be anything else. Second only to the Beatles, the Motown repertoire of hits are indelibly written on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Even those who don’t know Marvin Gaye from Maxwell, know Marvin Gaye. From movies to commercials, hip hop samples to cover songs, wedding singers to Karoake bars, Marvin and Motown is part of our lives.
This is a huge problem for Broadway. The Four Seasons were just popular enough to make “Jersey Boys” not simply a nostalgia trip but a new experience. But Motown can’t do this at all. We are not being reminded of songs, we remember these songs, we heard them yesterday and in vastly superior versions as well.
Gordy’s story is a FAMILIAL story, and the indie story par excellence with a house band playing, house songwriters writing, for changing lead figures. When you see what Tomas Doncker is doing? It is the same thing precisely. This is all interesting, but not the business of an extended soap like “Motown”.
So why does it have a $15M advance? Because people love it but if you love Motown, it should be a form of water boarding.