Here’s what you should not look for if you go see the Broadway smash Fela! at Belk Theater tonight: a linear narrative; songs performed in their entirety; context for some of the thornier details of the life of Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
Here’s what you can expect: ferocious, exuberant, awe-inspiring music and dance; lots of shimmering washboard abs and bouncing booties; a whirlwind of pop-cultural references ranging from Frank Sinatra to John Coltrane to James Brown to Bob Marley to Stokely Carmichael; feel-good displays of revolutionary righteousness. And did I mention ferocious, exuberant, awe-inspiring music and dance?
- Sharen Bradford
- Adesola Osakalumi
The big stars of the production, which opened Monday and returns to the Belk tonight for a second performance, are Adesola Osakalumi, who plays Fela with dazzling energy and charisma, and Melanie Marshall, whose rich, angelic voice as Fela’s mother steals several scenes. The unsung stars are the musicians of the traveling Fela Band, whose original leader, Aaron Johnson of the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, arranged Fela’s songs for the stage, turning his extended funk and jazz improvs into digestible nuggets that somehow retain the spirit of the original music. The weakest link in the touring line-up is new member Michelle Williams, the former Destiny’s Child singer. She landed the role of Fela’s African-American lover Sandra Isadore, who was responsible for introducing the late singer and activist to ’60s and ’70s American black power figures from Malcolm X to Angela Davis. Williams has neither the dance moves, the acting chops nor the voice – her Minnie Mouse vocals aren’t at all believable when she’s lecturing Fela on tough, American-style political activism – to pull off such an important role.
The setting for the musical is Fela’s final show at the Afrika Shrine, a nightclub located at his Kalakuta Republic commune outside Lagos, Nigeria. Throughout the 1970s, the Nigerian military had regularly harassed Fela for his outspokeness about the country’s political corruption. Then, in 1977, after the singer released his classic album Zombie – which characterized Nigeria’s military troops as brain-dead puppets of the country’s dictator-like general Olusegun Obasanjo – soldiers raided Fela’s commune, raped many of its occupants and threw the singer’s mother, the famed Nigerian feminist and political activist Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, out of a second-story window, causing injuries that would lead to her death two months later.
All of that and more is told in the musical by way of whiplash monologues that switch back and forth in time so quickly it’s hard to figure out when the appearances by Fela’s mother are apparitions and when they are real. Not that it matters too much. The cast and musicians had the audience packed into Belk Theater Monday night on its feet and dancing. And that’s the way it should be. This is musical theater, after all; if you want to learn about the real Fela, it’s best to enjoy the play for what it is and then for more depth and context go back to Fela’s massive discography, authoritative books like Michael Veal’s Fela: The Life of an African Musical Icon, and the documentary Fela Kuti: Music is the Weapon. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little intellectually short-changed as I left the theater.
Don’t get me wrong: Fela!, the Broadway musical, is an enjoyable production. It’s a good thing that mainstream American audiences are finally hearing about the music legend, learning a little about his political awakening and dangerous confrontations with Nigerian authorities, about Yoruba folk traditions and about how the singer and saxophonist mixed American jazz and funk with the West African musical style highlife to create Afrobeat. But what’s missing from this production is some really, really important stuff: while the play emphasizes the political oppression Fela fought, it glosses over or makes light of his dark sides (for example, he was a raging misogynist – ironic, given his mother’s feminism – who believed women are inferior to men) and it never once mentions that the singer died in 1997, at age 58, as a result of AIDS-related complications. To his final days, Fela denied HIV/AIDS, opposed contraception as “un-African,” and went on to father at least three more children after becoming infected with the virus.
To me, the omission of Fela having AIDS, in particular, is a glaring problem that extends beyond oversight into irresponsibility. During the performance of the song “Whose Coffin Will You Carry,” toward the end of the play, the writers and producers (including Jay-Z, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith) thrust a laundry list of important topics into the audience’s consciousness – coffins scrawled with the names of exploiters, from “Buhari” and “Shagari” (two Nigerian leaders and Fela foes) to “Halliburton,” “AIG” and “The World Bank,” were stacked up on stage for dramatic effect. And yet there was not one mention of AIDS, the real killer of Fela that has been one of Africa’s most destructive enemies, snuffing out more people than any military dictator or rogue capitalist.
To tell Fela’s story on stage without mentioning the pesky bad stuff belies the very first performance we see as the show opens: Fela, standing powerfully at center stage, giving a lecture about authenticity and rousing the audience into a sing-along to the lyrics, “Original – No Artificiality!”
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This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2013.
Agreed – I was so unimpressed with Michelle Williams. I thought the show was great – better if you knew some Fela background. Additionally, I wondered how they were going to deal with his death from AIDS and was surprised that it wasn’t dealt with at all. Maybe creative license…maybe just denial.
I completely agree re: Michelle Williams. Her voice didn’t blend with the other performers and she didn’t have the weight to carry the role she was supposed to be playing. I disagree that there was a complete gloss over… Fela’s misogyny was subtly but clearly shown in numerous interactions with his “wives” and the drug use was obvious. I was surprised that there wasn’t a nod to that in the Coffins sequence as well.
That being said, I went into it with the assumption that “Broadway production” and “exhaustive, accurate history” are pretty mutually exclusive. I think the show was a great introduction to the man and his music; even the friend I went with, who is familiar with Fela and afrobeat but not particularly crazy about it, was really impressed with the story and music, and had a great time.
Dear Mark,
I read your review with great interest and appreciation. You obviously ‘get it’! However, there are a couple of issues that you didn’t ‘get’ and i feel obliged to point out to you. I was Fela’s friend and manager for some 15 years until his sad passing in 1997. I had the honour and privilege of spending a great deal of time with him, both in Nigeria and on tour around the world and have also been involved since its inception with the creation and development of the musical. For your further information i spent a decade digitally remastering Fela’s catalogue of almost 50 albums and, with Fela’s blessings and on behalf of his Estate, transforming a disperate and scatttered collection into a coherent body of work. I am currently in the process of re-packaging and re-launching the entire catalogue in the UK, Eire and across mainland Europe.
The dictionary definition of ‘misogynist’ is ‘woman hater’. I can assure you that Fela did NOT hate women. On the contrary, he claimed that they were the source of his inspiration. At the same time, despite his radical and deeply pertinent views on a wide variety of subjects and issues, he was still a good Yoruba boy whose underlying views were a reflection of the society of which he was an intrinsic part. Western mores simply cannot be used to assess and judge the values and cultural legacy of an African. Having spent a great deal of time in Africa and being married to an African as well i can only assure you that you’ve over-simplified an extremely complex issue which cannot be boiled down into one word and certainly not with the added adjective of ‘raging’! I can only assure you that Fela’s Queens were not pussy cats. They were tigers! To suffer the price that they paid in beatings, arrests, rapes and the vilification of the bourgeoisie it would be impossible to make such sacrifices for a mysoginist.
The other problematic issue in the creation of the musical was that of bringing the subject of AIDS into a show which describes one short slice of Fela’s life from 1977 to 1978. Was he in denial about AIDS? Yes. unquestionably. Did he die of AIDS? As far as i’m concerned he died of one beating too many. He has scars all over his body , earned during the 200 arrests that he endured during his lifetime while defending those who had drawn ‘life’s short straw’. He was a giant of a man but a man nevertheless. The system can only take so much.
I’m sending you this with the greatest respect for what was an otherwise erudite and accurate review. (although i think you’re being extremely unfait to Michelle Williams. She’s an American woman playing the part of an American woman. How do you know if her interpretation isn’t a facsimile of the original Sandra Iszadore?)
Hoping you receive it in the spirit in which it is sent. i’m sending this to you and posting it online.
Kind regards
Rikki Stein
Thank you for reading and responding, Micky and Danielle.
And Rikki, a BIG “thanks” to you for your learned and heartfelt comments. I am deeply grateful for the context and nuanced clarifications you’ve contributed to the dialogue.
I think you are right about me going a bit too far by including the adjective “raging,” and you’re also correct that I used the more generally accepted definition of “misogynist” instead of the accurate definition; as a wordsmith, I should be more careful with my word choices. At any rate, while I don’t think the play got across Fela’s difficult relationship with women — whether cultural or not — I was not as concerned with that as I was the lack of any mention at all of his dying from complications of AIDS. I think that should have been mentioned. The play may have focused on a “short slice of Fela’s life from 1977 to 1978,” but the monologues provided plenty of backstory. So I think the narrative also should have carried the story through to the tragic circumstances that ended Fela’s life, which by all accounts I have ever read pretty clearly resulted from complications of his disease.
As for Michelle Williams? I maintain that she turned in a pretty weak performance, irrespective of the role she played. As for my overall feelings about the play — I’m thrilled it has brought Fela’s music to the attention of so many people, and overall, I enjoyed the hell out of it!
Again, thank you all for your comments.
Mark Kemp, i think you are completely too irresponsibly harsh on the Fela ! This show is good as it is. It is a celebration of most of Fela’s positive views and if anyone wants to know him better by the other facts that you are so dying to see depicted in the show, then let them go do their own researchings. And that includes you Mark.
I am so glad Rikki Stein clarified issues with you on the actual life of Fela, as I hope that other white pudits will undertake due diligent researches to unearth the actual Fela. This done in order to straighten a lot of misconstrued ideologies on Fela.
1. Was Fela a an actual Misogynist,
2. Did Fela actually died of AIDS infection through unprotected sex ?
3. Why did Fela wore that chain on neck, who gave that necklace chain?
These ideas on Fela may be wrong and as Rikki clarified the “Misogynist” false label plastered on Fela. Additionally, I will like to clarify that Fela was did not die of promiscuous sex related AIDS. He died of AIDS from injections he recieved behind closed doors in jail. Yes, the military killed Fela by injecting him with the virus, although they claim it was vaccination or antibiotics they were giving him behind bars.
Fela wore that necklace chain as a source of spiritual and physical protection, which was given to him by his beloved mother.
These facts are clear, based on people who actually know Fela that testified to this source of Fela’s infection. So if his AIDS issue is brought into the show without a clarified cause, isn’t it going make the show more controversial ??
Mark it is high to appreciate the show for what it is and please do more researching before criticking it. And YESS, I can agree with you that Michelle Williams has ways to go. But she will get better, we are optimistic and you should be. Thank you !!!
@Bode Scott Oguns: Nigerian gay-rights activist Bisi Alimi begs to differ. Here’s what he wrote last year on the topic in his piece “Why HIV denialists are putting lives at risk”:
“[Fela’s] autopsy stated he died from AIDS-related complications. It is still baffling to see that there are many people in Nigeria that still believed Fela never died of AIDS. Many argued there was a conspiracy about his autopsy.
“Fela was not the only one. Christine Maggiore gained fame in America by denying HIV and AIDS. She sold thousands of copies of her book What If Everything You Thought You Knew about AIDS Was Wrong? She became the poster girl for AIDS denialists. She was even used as cover model for the magazine Mothering…
“When she got pregnant, she refused to take anti-HIV drugs to protect her child from getting the virus. Worst still, she breastfed her baby despite the fact this put the baby at risk.
“Like Fela, Maggiore became the victim of her decisions.”
Mark if you read what I wrote earlier carefully, there no sentence whereby I denied Fela died of anything other than AIDS, what I stated was that Fela died of AIDS due to injections they gave him while he was locked up by the military and not through sex. This is a fact that was derived from people I spoke with that were close to him and not what the media was forced by the military at the time to print out. That still holds up till date.
You may hate Fela based on some of his decisions, that is your opinion and palaver as he wasn’t a perfect and neither was any other hero out there including Elvis, Micheal Jackson or JFK, however, facts are facts and i don’t think you got all the facts on Fela right. You are however entitled to your opinion though.
Also to enlighten you further about Fela, my dad knew Fela since he was a teenager {by living close to his family house}. His mother was the 1st woman to drive a car in Africa as far back as the early 1950s. Fela’s mother was a President Kwame Nkrumah’s secret lover on his private presidential yatch off the West African coast. When Fela’s beloved mom died, Fela took a coffin to the doorsteps of the military as a symbol of what they did to him. His mother was not actually in the coffin. Also during that period, Bob Marley was in Nigeria paying him a visit at the shrine, but Marley didn’t follow him with the coffin to the military doorsteps.
These are just some more facts to enlighten you Mr Kemp !!
Hate Fela? Hardly. I’m a huge fan of Fela. I’ve been a huge fan ever since I was first introduced to Fela’s music and activism in the 1980s. I think I made this abundantly clear in the review, as well as in my editor’s note about the production, and in our running Emiene Wright’s cover story on the production in Creative Loafing in the first place. I don’t hate Fela for his weaknesses any more than I think people should hate me for mine. However, in our zeal to lionize important people after their deaths, I do believe we often deny or downplay their humanness. In my humble opinion — and my opinion is just one of many — it is the totality of a person that makes a person.
Well i am glad Mark that you are actually a fan. Initially I had qualms as to why the AIDS issue wasn’t highlighted as a cause of his death. But I thought controversy may ensue as to what the true cause of Fela’s AIDS infection was.
The extra things I saw as additional inputs that could have been added in bits are
1. some of his other songs,
2. his mother’s story to uplift women {esp. when alive than rather being dead as a ghost},
3. some of the stars who visited him {Bob Marley, Paul McCautney, James Brown, Stevie Wonder etc} and
4. some of the commotion and jokes he created while brought in front of judges in courts.
All these in order to give more insights to him and to make the show even more mainstream, without taking out any originality. Because Fela was all about originality and he won’t want his show to be depicted in any other way.
@Bode Scott Oguns: I totally agree with those points, particularly your first two.