Is Broadway Ready for Afrobeat? Swivel Those Hips!

There was a lot of talk last season about the new Broadway beat of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Latino musical In the Heights (which became a multiple-Tony-winning hit), and Stu’s cult rock show Passing Strange (which didn’t). Mr. Miranda’s breakthrough musical was first staged at 37 Arts, the small, uninvitingly cold theater on West 37 Street where Bill T. Jones’ ambitious Fela! has opened the new season.

The Wall Street Journal recently asked the legendary Mr. Jones if he’d like to take his musical to Broadway.

“Yes, of course,” he replied, for Broadway’s seductions are weirdly eternal. But he cautiously wondered if the paradigm of the Great White Way is truly shifting. “In the Heights is bringing in a lot of Hispanic people,” he went on. “But is it possible to create a musical about a firebrand, pot-smoking, Afrobeat, womanizing black man and get people to come who also want to see South Pacific? That’s the question.”

The answer to that is some enchanted evening.

It seems to me that the die-hard fans of Rodgers and Hammerstein have about as much in common with the funky African folk hero Fela Anikulapo Kuti (who wanted to be president of Nigeria) as Sarah Palin does. Mr. Jones is asking the wrong question. The audience for Fela! isn’t the elderly white one swooning nostalgically over the World War II romance of South Pacific, but its polar opposite: a young, multiracial audience in search of the new and revolutionary.

A hero to the oppressed, Fela is the internationally known Nigerian rock star in an embroidered jumpsuit. The mythic creator of Afrobeat was a mesmerizing performer and gadfly freedom fighter who married 27 women in one ceremony (and reportedly divorced them all in another). During a police raid on his Lagos compound and commune—which he declared an independent republic—his 82-year-old mother, a renowned early feminist and respected political activist, was thrown from an upstairs window and subsequently died from her injuries.

Fela himself was jailed countless times for attacking the corrupt military government in his songs; people took to the streets singing them. When he died in 1997 at age 58 of complications from AIDS, an estimated one million Nigerians attended his funeral.

His extraordinary life and music would be a daringly inspired choice for any musical (either on or off Broadway). In the Heights, for all its verve, is a conventionally sentimental Broadway show with a rap beat and a happy ending; Mr. Jones’ Fela! is attempting something potentially dangerous in musical theater—the celebration of a charismatic high-life showman who used music as a political weapon.

BILL T. JONES has won a ton of major awards over the years for his radical dance work, including a Tony for his electric choreography for Spring Awakening, his Broadway debut. But that innovative musical isn’t dance-driven. (It’s based, after all, on Wedekind’s classic narrative of late-19th-century childhood angst and sexuality.) Musicals per se are new to Mr. Jones, who functions here in the multiple roles of Fela!’s choreographer, director, co-conceiver, and co-book writer. The outcome is an unexpected mess, like a hot public workshop that begins by excitingly raising the roof, goes on to beat you over the head, and finally disappoints.

I say so with regret, for the show’s immensely gifted ensemble of high-energy dancer-singers and performers is outstanding; its star, Sahr Ngaujah, is magnetic as the cool, swaggering Fela; and its onstage members of the Brooklyn-based band known as Antibalas are masters of Afrobeat and among the finest musicians in town.

What went wrong?

Mr. Jones has stumbled over the tale he wants to tell. Storytelling—as opposed to “concept”—is the director-choreographer’s traditional weakness. (Fosse, Bennett, and Robbins, among other born choreographers, had their own top book writers.) Fela! is badly in need of an authentic narrative to match its pulsating music and dance. “ORIGINAL NO ARTIFICIALITY!” goes its liberating chant—a defiant article of faith. But Mr. Jones has settled bewilderingly for the artificial concept of a musical biopic. It’s a tired old device.

The show is set in the Shrine, Fela’s nightclub at his Lagos compound, and on this night, he announces, will be his last performance before leaving Nigeria forever. (It won’t be—but never mind.) What follows is more like a concert version of a farewell concert, a rushed and haphazard summary of Fela’s life story. Mr. Jones also uses the hoary device of majestic visits from on high of Funmilayo, Fela’s saintly, martyred mum.

With his enviable pleasure in fat tokes, Mr. Ngaujah’s Fela is our renegade master of ceremonies and teller of an auto-hagiography. The show skims over Fela’s middle-class roots in Nigeria, his early dropout musical life in London, the transforming political influence of black nationalism during his 1960s sojourn in California, and on to outlaw stardom. He’s a complex figure presented without complexity.

If truth be told, there’s a whiff of the exuberant cruise director about this Fela. “Everyone say, ‘Yeah yeah!’” he greets us at the start. (We all obliged with a “Yeah yeah!”) “Feeling good tonight? I can feel it. Can you feel it?”

Not really. Alas, more audience participation was to follow. Led by the effortlessly sexy ensemble, we all stood up and gamely tried to gyrate our hesitant hips to the Afrobeat like giggly tourists.

“THE HOW AND WHY OF AFRICAN BEAT” is a scintillating sequence during which our exotic host deconstructs the birth of his irresistible Afrobeat. The hybrid new music included the influences of Yoruba call and response, the pseudo-cool of Frank Sinatra (of all people), the ultra-cool of modern American jazz and Miles Davis, the histrionics of James Brown and the joy of Nigerian High Life, the Cuban sounds of Chano Pozo, and Fela’s own spectacular brand of African funk.

But few other sequences in the show approach such blazing originality. The usually intensely disciplined, uncompromising Mr. Jones has found a thrilling dance vocabulary for Fela!, but he surprisingly lost the show’s pulse. The careless Act I borders on an unrelenting one-note pace, while the slow Act II is pious and solemn with its nod to the torture and abuse of Fela’s wives by government hoodlums, and the reappearance of Mum bathed in angelic light. The show even turns showbiz kitschy with its closing Day-Glo dream ballet of the gods, “Dance of the Orishas,” followed by a funereal march of coffins through the aisles.

“Shine”—the one song that wasn’t composed by Fela—comes during that prolonged, cobbled-together closing sequence, and it’s awfully like any other anodyne Broadway number intended to be a big finish. (“Here on this earth/ Here in your shrine/ This is your moment to shine. …”)

Fela! is otherwise a jukebox musical of a superior, politically aware kind. But its visceral music and lyrics can’t propel the story forward. Nor can they tell a story. Almost all of the hit numbers—“Water Get No Enemy,” “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense”—are protest songs. “Everything Scatter,” for example, seems like an upbeat crowd-pleaser. In fact, it’s one of Fela’s fierce protests against injustice and wrongful arrest.

Fela! makes an uncomfortable marriage of art and commerce. Its dominating hero has been allowed to turn the show into a near-monologue with only two other, sketchy characters to help him out—Fela’s first love, the activist Sandra Isidore, played by the underused and wonderful young talent, Sparlha Swa; and Fela’s mother, Funmilayo, performed by Abena Koomson with a dignity that transcends the meager, clichéd role.

There are other perplexing lapses in the show. Let them be. If Bill T. Jones’s Fela!—which has been acclaimed by other reviewers in spite of its flaws—does transfer to Broadway, good luck to it. But let’s hope they fix it first.

jheilpern@observer.com