Latest from Chicago Critic

Motown The Musical tells the story of Berry Gordy whose passion for and instinctual feel for pop R &B musical and his leadership and mentoring skills brought him from ‘want-s-be’ music producer to a major music mogul who changed the flavor of pop music forever! Clifton Oliver plays Gordy as a determined, passionate yet controlling visionary who launched and nurtured fledgling music talents in super-stars. The talented cast of 33 landed the song with high energy.

After a long series of introductory scenes, we realize these zealous religious ignorant folks are long on bigotry as they naively accept the main premise of the play: that their grandfather, in 1943 had a vision from the Blessed Mother while working in his barbershop that lead to him have a twenty foot statue in front of the show to commemorate and offer hope the poor Buffalo folks

Marra’s book and Steinhagen score suffer from casting that finds few players who can sing. That spells trouble for a musical. True that Joseph Stearns and Vincent Lonergan adequately deliver their clever tunes and Courtney Jones sings her ballads with heart and an adequate voice, but the rest of the cast can’t sing well enough to do justice to Steinhagen’s score.

With all the fine technical features together with a excellent orchestra and a game cast doing an iconic well-know piece, there is no need to add bland new music or lyrics – just trust the material and do it with verve and class. This production, when it does the ‘old material,’ mostly does a fine job making the production worth seeing.

This Broadway musical has not held up after more than fifty years and it is seldom produced in Chicago because the material is mediocre and the book comes off as more goofy than satirical despite Rob Lindley’s correct choice to play all the corporate types larger-than-life. There are laughs, terrific energetic choreography (by Brenda Didier) and several terrific performances but the shows seems to be trying to hard to land such out of date material.

As the flashbacks demonstrate the pressure the steel companies face from a dwindling marker for steel, union pressure to save jobs and the stress from undermanned steel mills, a tragedy became more likely. Sprinkled throughout are the Widows who expound on the conventional grieving they experience after their loss.