Ain’t Too Proud: the Temptations’ story told with little nuance but lots of heart

Oh no, not another jukebox musical! The West End isn’t making enough room for serious drama. But, sue me, Ain’t Too Proud – which premiered on Broadway in 2019 and suffered Covid-interruptus – isn’t the incomer to get cross with.

The rest of its title – “The Life and Times of the Temptations” – explains what it’s about: imparting the rise and unlikely endurance of America’s top R&B group, raiding the back-catalogue to tell the tale. Mechanical, formulaic, even cynical? It ain’t necessarily so. It’s impeccably choreographed down to the last finger-click, beautifully staged (by Des McAnuff, who obtains and maintains an imposing monochrome aesthetic) and the singing is exquisite. Sure, the script by Dominique Morisseau is subtle as a brick. Drawing on the memoir of founder and sole surviving member Otis Williams (Sifiso Mazibuko), it’s quite tour guide-ish. Yet its efficiency ensures the evening packs almost 30 numbers into the mix, and it conveys the remorseless operating principle that “made” the group but broke some of its members.

If the show errs towards sanitised tribute, it still excavates the dark side of music-biz logic. Bright talents convene on the mean streets of ’60s Detroit and are assembled into a winning five-strong combo at Motown records. The hit factory will strip in personnel as required – Smokey Robinson’s My Girl doesn’t chart high enough, so in comes producer Norman Whitfield.

The first half sees singer David Ruffin lose himself to drugs and egotism – out he goes; the second bids farewell to Paul Williams, rendered unreliable by booze (sadly taking his own life in 1973). When Mitchell Zhangazha’s Eddie Kendricks – another of the first famous five to fall by the wayside – sustains the high note at the end of Just My Imagination, as an adieu to the group, it does divine justice to a classic but also fosters a sense of toiling lives discarded, only the songs lasting.

Time and again, golden oldies are stitched to biographical moments. Sometimes intercut with dialogue, then resuming, they float parallels without asserting direct connections, allowing us to intuit the suppressed emotion behind the beaming smiles or the real-world pain beneath the soulful vocals. Since I Lost My Baby reads as an elegy for a failed marriage, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted as a requiem for Otis’s son Lamont, who died tragically young, his Papa too much a rolling stone. We relate to these songs; they did too.

“Can’t move backwards pa, don’t nothing rewind but a song,” Lamont says. In that passing wisdom lies succinct reason enough why this merits your time.

 Booking until Oct 1. Tickets: 0344 482 5151; ainttooproudmusical.co.uk