Playing it safe

Put the life of a legendary music-maker/campaigner in the hands of a controversial choreographer and you’ll possibly end up with some explosive stuff.

Put the life of a legendary music-maker/campaigner in the hands of a controversial choreographer and you’ll possibly end up with some explosive stuff. This is what the Broadway producer Stephen Hendel might have had in mind when he asked Bill T. Jones to direct and choreograph a musical about Fela Kuti. But whether or not he saw his dream realised, I am not sure.

Fela! hails from Broadway where it has been a long-running sizzling hit. It has great music, an almost endless stream of colourful numbers and an engaging storyline. Yet it never moves beyond the well-established formulae of musical theatre’s equivalent of a biopic. The inner struggle of the protagonist, the harsh and sometimes horrific vicissitudes of his life, are portrayed with the typical Broadway/West End gloss — at the expense of history and its crudeness.

Jones’s diehard fans may feel seriously let down. The man who made waves with his naked rendition of the Last Supper and the performative exploitation of terminally ill people in Still Here seems to have turned his back on controversy in favour of safer commercial theatre.

He is not the first great name from the dance world to tackle a musical: George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp and, most significantly, the African–American dance pioneer Kathryn Dunham are among the many who have done so. Alas, he is no match for such illustrious predecessors. His directorial approach shows little innovation: the story starts in 1978, in Kuti’s club The Shrine, and develops through a series of biographical flashbacks and flash-forwards. Some of Jones’s most distinctive signature ideas punctuate the performance, and the eponymous character engages happily with the viewers either to provoke or amuse them.