Motown The Musical
Opening Night: April 14, 2013
Closing: January 18, 2015
Theater: Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
A new musical based on the life of Berry Gordy, the famed record producer who founded the Motown label.
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April 14, 2013
the show stuffs 67 songs into its two-hour-and-45-minute running time. Such abundance suggests that impresario Berry Gordy-who created the fabulously successful music factory and has written and produced this entertainment about its history-has strong convictions about what his audience wants. If you are looking to bathe in nostalgia evoked by beloved tunes while watching talented and committed professionals do their industrious best to locate the magic of legendary performers, this is the show for you. If you prefer a well-written story with multidimensional characters that digs beneath the surface and uses song with dramatic acumen, then steer clear.
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April 14, 2013
Instead of having to endure perhaps a dozen different jukebox musicals based on various Motown icons in future years, "Motown: The Musical" allows us to get it all over with in one shot. It’s an unwieldy and unfocused attempt to package dozens of hit songs from all the trailblazing Motown performers of the 1960s and 1970s into a single sugarcoated, sanitized narrative revolving about workaholic megaproducer Berry Gordy. Still, this elaborate, very busy production ought to please anyone looking to take a nostalgia trip and overlook its problems. 2 stars
READ THE REVIEWApril 14, 2013
The 2 1/2-hour show, about Motown Records under founder Berry Gordy, opened Sunday at The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre completely unbalanced: The songs are staggering, the book utterly flimsy. Both are due to one man: Gordy, who clearly knows what makes an indelible hit song, but also has an inability to write objectively about that skill. As the book writer, Gordy comes across almost divine, a true visionary who literally changed the world and race relations but was eventually abandoned by the artists he made stars when they sought to cash in. There are parts of the show that even a North Korean dictator would find excessively flattering.
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April 14, 2013
Many of the greatest pop hits of our collective lifetimes just keep on coming in “Motown: The Musical,” and there simply is no resisting the powerfully familiar music that rocks the rafters of the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where the new Broadway show opened on Sunday.
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April 14, 2013
For all the richness of its gold-and-platinum-plated soundtrack, “Motown” would be a much more satisfying nostalgia trip if Mr. Gordy and his collaborators were more effective curators of both story and song, rather than trying to encompass the whole of the label’s fabled history in two and a half hours. Irresistible as much of the music is, I often had the frustrating impression that I was being forced to listen to an LP being played at the dizzying, distorting speed of a 45."
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