The first show of my friends and my second year as season ticket holders for Broadway Dallas! This year is another fire roundup and this first show started with a bang and honestly took me by surprise. Just a heads up that we did see this show back in September.
If you follow me on Instagram or Tiktok, you know that I’m not the biggest fan of biography juke box musicals. What type of musicals are those? They’re the ones that basically take you on the full story of how a band was formed or how a singer started their career and takes you through their entire journey. The rise and fall of their career essentially. Some examples of these musicals are Jersey Boys, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical , and On Your Feet! Ain’t Too Proud follows the life and journey of The Temptations and while I’m familiar with a few of their songs, I knew nothing of this group.
The thing that surprised me the most about their story was how many Temptations there were aside from the original five. Normally a band stays together with the original group, think of Franki Valli and the Four Seasons, and then whenever a member wants to leave, the group ends up disbanding or going on hiatus. Take Mumford and Sons as an example of this. The Temptations ended up replacing members as others either left the group, was fired from the group, or sadly passed away.
Here are my overall thoughts of this show before I get into details. I actually really enjoyed the show and the choreography was amazing. My biggest complaint was that Act I was very lengthy and because there are so many hit songs from this group, they only did snippets of the songs throughout the show. As soon as it felt like we were getting into a song, it would either end or move on to another song. That didn’t help the feeling that we were in each act for an extended amount of time.
While I didn’t particularly enjoy the layout of the songs, the vocals of the cast on the tour were top notch. Each cast member took us on an emotional journey of their group, but also what was going on culturally around the world, such as the the Detroit riots and the Civil Rights era. By the end of the show they had the audience singing along and dancing in their seats to their favorite Temptations song.
Principal cast members (at this performance): Michael Andreaus (u/s Otis Williams), James T. Lane (Paul Williams), Harrell Holmes Jr. (Melvin Franklin), Jalen Harris (Eddie Kendricks), Elijah Ahmad Lewis (David Ruffin), Brett Michael Lockley (Al Bryant), Dwayne P. Mitchell (Dennis Edwards), Brian C. Binion (u/s Richard Street)
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