Sahr Ngaujah in Fela!By Hap Erstein
My season-end Broadway visit is coming to a close, and it is fair to say it has been a surprisingly strong year for plays and a pretty disappointing one for musicals.
Tony Award nominations get announced Tuesday and the committee is going to have to be pretty creative to fill some of the musical categories. (There are only two musicals with original scores, so the eligibility branch has declared such plays as Enron and Fences to be nomination-worthy for their incidental music.)
Not only will the 2009-2010 be remembered for some woeful new shows and even worse revivals, but as the season when plot became virtually absent from the musical landscape. I probably made a mistake in not seeing American Idiot, based on the Green Day concept album, which director Michael Mayer cobbled into a plotless story about three suburban guys confronting adulthood, but it typifies this dubious trend.
The same goes for Million Dollar Quartet, the recreation of a recording session among emerging stars Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley. And if there is a plot to Twyla Tharp’s dance concert Come Fly Away, I missed it.
I guess you could say the same for the explosive Fela!, a musically vibrant, high-energy biography of the late Nigerian songwriter-performer-political activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti, but the show is so infectious that the lack of a story line seems irrelevant. Bill T. Jones (Tony winner for the dance moves of Spring Awakening) directs and choreographs a cast of high-stepping, tush-shaking dancers who roam throughout the aisles, while Sahr Ngaujah as Fela gets the audience up on its feet for a little tribal dancing and call-and-response singing.
Broadway has been slow to embrace other cultures, but Fela! takes a major leap into the exotic, beat-heavy world of Fela’s Afrika Shrine club. The show has been able to draw a sizeable, enthusiastic audience and it will be interesting to see whether Tony Awards will follow, because there really is no traditional musical to fall back on this season.
Trying to wash away the bad taste left by The Addams Family, I headed off Friday to the Museum of the City of New York to take in a wonderful exhibit of cartoons, drawings and New Yorker covers by Charles Addams, a reminder that, yes, he can be funny when he is not being clumsily re-interpreted on Broadway. The exhibit traces the gradual invention of the Addams family unit, which perversely was discouraged from appearing in The New Yorker after Gomez, Morticia and the clan became too “commercial” after they had their own sitcom on television.
The exhibit continues through June 8.