The new Broadway musical, “Fela!,” has some fun dance numbers but is largely a disastrous, disconnected and misogynistic production about the life of Nigerian Afrobeat superstar and political activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti. It takes place in the African Shrine, a nightclub in Nigeria where Fela (Sahr Ngaujah) is giving his final concert and telling his life story through the songs that he wrote.
“Fela!” delivers a glorious spectacle with impressive percussive afrobeats and delicious dancing, but the play is so desultory that if there is a message, it gets lost in the jumble. Without a coherent storyline, the production is disorienting. It doesn’t establish tone appropriately. The dance numbers are so vivacious, fun and sexual, that it’s unnerving when we hear excruciating details about how Fela’s wives were tortured in the second act: all signs in the first act pointed towards this being a generally light production.
Even when the production gets serious, it gets serious about characters who have never been developed and that we have never learned to care for: Fela’s wives are indistinguishable, scantily clad background dancers without personality, and his mother (Melanie Marshall) is treated as an idolized savior. While the atrocities committed against them are atrocious by any standards, the play lacks the poignancy that it could have had if any of them had been developed into more than clichés of the messianic mother and the whorish wives. The only character in the play with any development–and even that is shallow–is Fela, our obnoxious host.
“Fela!” is never fully able to create an emotional connection because the entirety of the story occurs in an isolated place–the African Shrine–and is guided by Fela, a largely isolated figure: we rarely see signs of the poor state of the world seeping into the Shrine. Most of the audience is not already well-versed in Nigerian history, making it difficult to guess at the important historical events that are occurring when the play is set. The play doesn’t even provide subtle hints of these. Without the outside world seeping into Fela’s world in the African Shrine, there is no context. And without context, it’s impossible to understand how the world is affecting Fela and how he is effecting change in it.
It’s not an impossible task to achieve this harmony between the story of Fela and his connection to that of Nigeria. Consider “Cabaret,” a play about people and politics, in many ways the predecessor to “Fela!”, where the emcee is our guide–here Fela is our emcee. In “Cabaret,” we get to know the characters well as three-dimensional, realistic people. The reason “Cabaret” is so heartbreaking and moving is that we get to see how the influence of the Nazis is slowly seeping into their world and impacting their lives: the merry singing and dancing is about active denial of the real world. In “Fela,” we can’t quite tell what the point of the singing and dancing is. Mostly, it comes off as shallow entertainment.
“Fela!” provides us with some jaw-dropping dance numbers, with impressively athletic vibrating and gyrating, set to some foot-tappingly good rhythms. But while it had the potential to deal with real issues, such as how and why Fela helped or tried to help his country, it settled instead for crowd-pleasing numbers that focus on sex and feces rather than on the problems Fela was famous for rebelling against.