Fela’s Dancing Revolution

After stressing for a bit about the cost of seeing three Broadway shows this long weekend, we convinced ourselves this wasn’t going to happen again for a good long time and went for it.

Jan had really, really wanted to see Fela!.

And we did.

The thread of a plot is the musical revolutionary life of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Nigerian pioneer of the Afrobeat musical form, as well as relentless critic of his country’s corruption and tyranny, with plenty of energy left over to chastise the multinationals that climbed into bed with the military dictatorship.

I understand what we saw was nearly twenty minutes shorter than its original off Broadway version.

Ben Brantley’s review says of the production “Fela!” doesn’t so much tell a story as soak an audience to and through the skin with the musical style and sensibility practiced by its leading man. That style is Afrobeat, an amalgam of diverse cultural elements that will be parsed and reassembled during the show by its performers and the wonderful Antibalas, an Afrobeat band out of Brooklyn.

Brantley goes on to say Lillias White plays Funmilayo, the government-baiting feminist who was Fela’s mother and whose ancestral spirit haunts her son. As anyone who saw her in “The Life” knows, Ms. White’s voice can penetrate the heavens, so it seems perfectly plausible that Funmilayo could become the goddess that Fela visits in the afterlife, in the show’s most elaborately conceived and fantastical sequence.

But the heart, soul and pelvis of “Fela!” are located most completely in the phalanx of female dancers (I counted nine, but they feel legion) who stand in for the 27 women Fela married. Fela called these beauties his queens, and they are hardly your traditional chorus line

Mathew Murray’s review sucinctly describes the experience. Director-choreographer (Bill T.) Jones, who won a Tony for his dances in Spring Awakening but finds a much surer outlet here, has injected everyone with pure caffeine plasma. He inspires them to kick, shake, slither, and strut through Fela’s songs, which are explosive only insofar as they state what the ruling class doesn’t want to hear: mainly criticisms of the corruption that’s caused intense poverty and treats ordinary people as criminals. (Sound familiar?) The songs are charged, yes, but you can still derive copious thrills by absorbing them simply as insinuating, pounding music. To the characters onstage, however, Fela’s music is the rhythmic rumble of freedom.

Now Murray’s review says the original was much more political and what we got was sanitized for the more conventional Broadway audience.

Perhaps.

But I found it political enough. At the intermission Jan leaned over to me and said, “This isn’t going to end well.”

That wasn’t a comment on the sets, the costumes, both of which took us completely to 1978 Lagos and Fela’s club, the Shrine, the music, which was infectious, or the dancing which was astonishing, or the performances, all of which were compelling, particularly Sar Ngaujah’s incarnation of Fela. (I gather he developed this part in the off Broadway version, but now shares it alternatively with Kevin Mambo), which conveyed anger, humor, and drive all incarnated in this one man.

Jan’s comment was that this musical revolution wasn’t going to work.

And one didn’t need to know Nigerian history to know that.

Just a little history…

Too much about one brilliant but undisciplined leader, too idiosyncratic, too narcissistic. And up against a machine that was prepared to devour the artist, his associates, and his followers.

Of course that’s what tragedy is all about.

Like with Hair, when the whole thing collapses in blood and death there is a theatrical attempt to pull it all together again with a reprise of the energy and hope that bubbled through the production up to that end…

And I’m up for that.

For me this coda to life, even life on stage, spoke to the relentless drive in our human hearts to be something more,

to live full,

to engage full,

to stand against the forces that almost certainly will at some point bring down the curtain.

and yet, and yet, the beat goes on.

Coursing through our bodies.

Life itself.

Good message that…