Most Happy “Fela”
by Frank Episale
When the reviews for the Broadway iteration of Fela! hit the stands (or, more accurately in my case, the RSS feeds), I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on. Normally staid critics were breaking out the superlatives and the exclamation points by the bushel. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley opened his review by proclaiming that “there should be dancing in the streets.” Time Out New York’s David Cote, in a sentence immediately plastered all over the show’s advertising, called Fela! “more than a musical;
Kevin Mambo in “Fela!”
it’s an ecstatic phenomenon.” Critics for New York magazine, while acknowledging that the musical glosses over some of its subject’s more problematic facets, goes on to say “But seriously, who cares? As an evening’s entertainment, Fela! is without peer.”
All of this sounded like a bit much, but I was hearing similar reports from friends who had seen the show. When it came time to celebrate my mother’s birthday, I gave her choices of a few different Broadway musicals, hoping she would choose Fela!, and she did. And damned if it wasn’t the most exciting thing I’ve seen on Broadway, probably ever.
Fela! is named for its title character, Fela Kuti, a Nigerian musician, activist, and night club owner who died in 1997 but whose legend has grown in the ensuing couple of decades. The play is set in the Shrine, the club where Kuti holds court. The conceit is that the audience members of the show are attending a concert at the club. Most of the book is made up of Kuti’s pointed banter with his audience and his band, though the structure is kept fluid enough to allow for some flashbacks and other dramatic devices as parts of Fela’s history are unfolded for the audience’s edification. Some of these scenes work powerfully, while others fall a little flat, but the point of this show, really, is the infectious, groove-based Afrobeat music. Oh, and the dancing: the most astonishingly athletic, committed, sensual, full-bodied dancing I’ve ever seen in a Broadway theatre.
The title role is played at alternate performances by Sahr Ngaujah, who starred in Fela!’s downtown run at the Public last year, and Kevin Mambo, who performed in the show I saw. The actor of this role is given no choice but to shoot for a tour-de-force performance and Mambo, thankfully, succeeds. Fela jokes, teases, rages, sings, and weeps, dancing the whole time. He also leads the onstage band and the show’s extraordinary ensemble, who take many of their cues from him. The actor only pretends to play the saxophone (astute spectators will notice that the band’s sax player is upstage wailing while the show’s lead struts about miming the solos), but he has to be a real band leader in order for the show to work. A lot of actors have tried and failed to own the stage in the same way a rock star does, but Mambo’s Fela holds court convincingly.
The quality and energy of the ensemble can’t be overstated. The group dance numbers, from overtly sexual hip grinding to a spectacular variation on a Yoruba egungen ritual, are the heart of this show. Director and choregrapher Bill T. Jones has put together an ensemble that rules the stage with grace, power, and spectacular athleticism. As for the singing, Kuti’s songs only occasionally give the lead actor the opportunity to show off his pipes in an American Idol sort of way, but Lillias White, as Kuti’s mother Funmilayo, and Saycon Sengbloh, as the American woman who introduces him to the notion of “black power,” more than make up for it. Fela!’s design team also impresses, particularly Lighting Designer Roebert Wierzel and projection Designer Peter Nigrini, who each know when to use their virtuosity to dazzle and when to use it in support of the action on stage, helping to make the show as immersive as possible given the venue.
Despite a generally celebratory tone, history and politics play a part in the show, as does Kuti’s complex, devoted relationship to his feminist mother, who was harassed and tortured by police. While some of these sections drag a little, they also manage to leave you wanting more. Fela-as-legend is fun, but Fela-as-flesh-and-blood-activist-and-gadfly is a richer story. One riff describing Europeans and Americans as once-admired guests who have overstayed their welcome (they seemed nice at first, but then things started to go missing: soap, towels, petroleum, people…) is both funny and barbed, and makes you wish the show as a whole had more teeth. A documentary-theatre scene in which actors recite reports of police atrocities while the pictures of the people they are playing are projected onto an upstage screen was profoundly moving and served as a powerful reminder of what it was Kuti was protesting against. I also wish Kuti’s less appealing moments (he famously declared that wearing condoms was “un-African,” and eventually died of AIDS) were included at least in passing.
Politics aside, Fela!’s greatest failing is born of its successes. The show is designed to make us want to dance (indeed, early on Kuti orders the audience to their feet and teaches them some rudimentary pelvis thrusts), but Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill theatre is designed to keep us in our seats. Despite some nods toward audience participation, some dancing in the aisles, and bars that remain open throughout the show (a zombie and two bottles of water cost me $22), this just isn’t a space that encourages movement and interaction. Still, at the end of every song, the audience (my mother included) gave rock concert-worthy ovations, hooting and hollering with an energy rarely felt on the (all too-seldom) Great (all too)-White Way.
Reviews of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, as directed by Joe Mantello at MCC’s Lucille Lortel Theatre, haven’t been quite as ecstatic as those for Fela! (Brantley had decidedly mixed feelings about it), but there has still been a distinct buzz around the play. This is in part the result of very smart publicity about Campbell and, even more so, about the cast of young Brits who are widely (and rightly) considered rising stars. Oddly, though, the buzz has also centered on the politics of visibility. This season’s off-Broadway offerings (largely a reflection of last year’s London season), seem rife with “serious” plays about gay men and their pre-Stonewall struggles (as well as what will likely come to be called their pre-marriage struggles).
It’s strange to think that the presence of gay (mostly white) men on New York’s stages should be cause for celebration, consternation, or even much notice, but from The Pride, to The Temperamentals (an historical drama about Harry Hay’s political and sexual awakening), to Yank! (a musical about gay soldiers in World War II) — to name just a few — this season seems to have become what Charles Isherwood called “the city’s unofficial spring festival of gay theater.”
What’s striking about these new plays by relatively young writers is how old-fashioned, and even conservative, most of them are. The Pride is no exception. Set in that mythical version of England where rail-thin Brits with perfect posture spout witty, perfectly formed sentences at a mile a minute, without ever having to pause to search for the right word, Campbell’s play feels like a museum piece laced with just enough profanity and sex to titillate. It is an unapologetically middlebrow play, competently crafted and aimed squarely at an audience of aging, well-off gays who still bear the scars of their formative years and who consider the depiction of that struggle in a well-appointed mainstream piece of theatre to be one more step of bringing their culture out of the closet.
The play is set in 1958 and 2008, the actors playing alternate-reality versions of the same characters caught up in two different kinds of love triangles. In 1958, Philip (Hugh Dancy) is married to Sylvia (Andrew Riseborough) but has secret desires that are awakened by his wife’s new boss Oliver (Ben Wishaw), who longs to be able to love openly. In 2008, Philip has left Oliver after a year and a half live-in relationship in which Oliver has failed to overcome his addiction to sex with strangers (the more menacing — and well-hung — the better), while Sylvia, Philip’s best friend and confidant, struggles to balance the neediness of her pet gay with the demands of her own love life.
Elegantly directed and beautifully acted, The Pride is at turns moving and funny, but it is also puzzling and ultimately disappointing on a number of levels. The dual-decade structure cries out to be read as a statement on the state of gay culture, but whatever message Campbell has in mind is muddled. Is he saying that public, anonymous sex is something to stand up and fight for like the rejection of the closet was fifty years ago? Is he saying that our struggle for sexual openness or equality has arguably taken us a step too far (even as it is not yet finished?) Is he saying that today’s young gays still bear the scars of the struggles of an earlier generation? This last is the most likely, and most reasonable, of course, but the play’s politics are difficult to read. Political inscrutability is not always a liability, but in this case it doesn’t seem to be the result of complexity or individuality or even just disregard for identity politics; it seems rather to be a play that is trying to say something specific but can’t quite get its message across.
A description of a pride parade in one of the 2008 scenes comes closest to clearing things up: “It’s a demonstration, a celebration, and a fashion show, in that order.” Whatever its flaws, The Pride has clearly struck a nerve with its audience, earning an extended run of sold-out houses largely on the strength of word-of-mouth publicity. More than a century ago, Shaw famously claimed that “problem plays,” plays that engage directly with social issues can only hold an audience’s attention for as long as the controversies they’re addressing remain relevant. When there’s no longer a “problem,” the problem play is forgotten. Based on the success of The Pride and its brethren, then, the closet door hasn’t been blown off its hinges quite yet. In the context of true equality, and true acceptance, there would be little need for assertions of “pride.”
