Some of you may know that we have season tickets to the Fox Theatre's Broadway series here in St. Louis -- this is our guilty pleasure and a guaranteed date night 6 or 7 times a year. I've had these tickets for nearly 10 years and always look forward to the variety of new shows coming through on tour each year.
This year's season included "MOTOWN The Musical", billed as "the real story of Berry Gordy and Motown Records, featuring the music that inspired a generation, defined an era, re-shaped the music industry, and changed our culture forever."
As promised, this show was a blockbuster musically -- with performances of over 40 of the greatest Motown songs by an incredible cast of performers playing the roles of Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5 (including little Michael!), Marvin Gaye, The Temptations and many others. If you are a fan of any of this music, you would definitely enjoy what was almost more of a concert vs. a Broadway musical.
The show was written by Berry Gordy, and based on a book he had previously written called "To Be Loved: The Music, The Magic, The Memories of Motown". The story is centered around him and how he created the Motown record company from the ground up, and the way he created the careers of so many entertainers who are icons in the music business today.
There were several portions of the story which told about the difficulties they had in the 1960's while trying to get their music played on "white" stations, and also the harsh, racially segregated environments they visited on tour, especially in the south. Places where there were posted signs and police enforcing a policy of "no race mixing" with threats of being beaten with a billy club if you wandered across the wrong line.
There was one scene where there the character was talking about "trigger-happy cops" -- to which the entire audience responded loudly in agreement with a spontaneous burst of applause. The next line was something similar to "But there are some good policemen out there too", which got a response as well, but with much less enthusiasm. The more I thought about it, this story really was an allegory to the current situation in St. Louis today.
Before the show, I noticed we were sitting by several apparently well-off people who mentioned they were from "West County" -- and I had the opportunity to overhear their conversations about a variety of topics, but one topic stood out -- the situation in Ferguson and their opinions about it. It was very apparent that these particular people were so out of touch with the reality of it -- they were hoping it would all go away in a few days after people finished their leftover turkey. There was no acknowledgement of the fact that the problems brought to light by the shooting of Michael Brown have been going on for *generations* in this country, and they're not going away just because Darren Wilson didn't get indicted.
This simple irony wasn't lost on me either: This production, with an almost 100% black cast, a black director, many black musicians, telling a story about the struggles of making forward progress as a black-centric business in the 60s -- was produced here in St. Louis, for the past 2 weeks, during the "State of Emergency" and the buildup to the release of the Grand Jury's decision, during the ensuing protests, riots and looting following the announcement of those results.
I hope there were other people in the theatre last night who were paying attention. I was.
