On December 21st, 1981, a review of the new musical Dreamgirls appeared in The New York Times. “When Broadway history is being made,” wrote its author, Frank Rich, “you can feel it.
What you feel is a seismic emotional jolt that sends the audience, as one, right out of its wit. While such moments are uncommonly rare these days, I'm here to report that one popped up at the Imperial last night.”
He was referring to “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” the fierce and defiant song closing out the first act of Dreamgirls. You don’t make Broadway history with a song that isn’t great—not unless you drop dead while singing it, anyway. Nearly 45 years later, it remains a great song. If you hurry, you can hear it live at Grand Rapids Circle Theatre; Dreamgirls is onstage through July 26th.
Of course, Dreamgirls is more than one song. It’s an epic, following the fortunes of the Dreamettes (later, the Dreams), a 1960s Chicago-based girl group with hopes of making their way into the big time.
The show opens on Harlem’s famed Apollo theater, as an amateur night event takes place. The Stepp Sisters sing “I’m Looking For Something,” a gentle R&B number. Little Albert and the Tru-Tones, natty and confident, serve up “Goin’ Downtown.” Tiny Joe Dixon, a bluesman, slaps “Takin’ The Long Way Home” on the table. It’s an amiable and nostalgic series of songs, serving to anchor us in time and place, but we’re not here for that: we’re here for the Dreamettes.
They are Deena Jones (Rainell Sterling), Effie White (Reette Thorns), and Lorrell (CeCe D.). All three are talented, but Effie’s the star; she has a voice that can go soft and ethereal before ratcheting up to soulful and pained. And she has a star’s instincts; when the group’s offered good money to sing backup, the others leap at the chance, but she vetoes it—at least, she does at first.
They perform “Move (You’re Steppin’ On My Heart)”. It’s a good song and they sing it well enough that they seem certain to win the contest. But the thing’s rigged. Still, there was that offer to sing backup for Jimmy “Thunder” Early (Brian Freeman). It’s paid, and it’s for ten weeks… they take it.
Early, hugely talented and charismatic, is something of a James Brown figure (indeed, one of his signature moves is surely inspired by the hardest working man in show business, who sometimes pretended to be utterly exhausted only to rally again). But there are also elements of Marvin Gaye, maybe Otis Redding, and others: Black American men incapable of singing with anything but their whole souls.
Soon enough our girls are playing headlining shows. Only there’s a problem. Their manager, Curtis Taylor Jr. (Keo Foster), wants to change the world: he wants to break a Black act into the pop charts. And to do it, he thinks, he needs to replace wildly talented Effie with Deena. Deena’s talented, too, which matters. What matters more, he thinks, is that she’s slim and conventionally beautiful.
And that’s where “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” comes in. It’s pure defiance, an armor of will surrounding a core of hurt. Thorns nails it. Every note is perfectly delivered and seemingly deeply felt. Just as she did three months ago in Civic’s production of The Color Purple, Thorns proves herself to be a performer to watch—indeed, a perfect you can’t help but watch.
In the second half of the show, time speeds up. The Dreams, now lacking Effie and led by Deena, continue to hold sway over the pop world. We see glimpses of lives, rather than feeling, as we did in the first act, that we were following something like a single story. The music becomes less varied; the deep soul that was so effective in Effie’s show-stopping number seems, at times, in other numbers, shouty.
It’s interesting to learn that, in an early version of the show, Effie died at the end of the first act. Jennifer Holliday, who played her, briefly left the production, frustrated by the way the second act focused on Deena. Well, art mirrors life. The rewritten version, the one playing today, solves some problems while introducing others. It satisfies, but not completely.
That matters and it doesn’t. “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” is still miraculous. And there’s a world of talent onstage. Early, played so marvelously by Freeman, met his match in Thorns’ Effie. He might not have realized it. But we did, and she did, too.
Dreamgirls
Circle Theatre
July 10-26
https://circletheatre.org/production/dreamgirls/
