Fela!

CAN YOU FELA THE LOVE? Ngaujah sings out against tyranny.

Photograph: Monique Carboni

Anyone who caught Broadway’s boho-rock showpiece Passing Strange can attest to how weird and wonderful it is to see a musical that isn’t your usual jazz-hands spectacular. That’s the primary draw for Fela!, choreographer Bill T. Jones’s production about a day in the life of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late Nigerian bandleader-activist-provocateur whose Afrobeat sound crossed James Brown with jazz and native Yoruban rhythms.

Afrobeat’s percolating funk—played by local groove ensemble Antibalas—envelops audience members the moment they enter. Soon, Fela (Ngaujah) struts onstage as he might have on any ’70s evening at his Lagos nightclub the Shrine. We learn he recently suffered a harrowing experience at the hands of Nigeria’s savage military (true story: They raided his communal compound, beat him and threw his politically active mother from a second-story window, causing injuries that eventually killed her). Nevertheless, Fela stokes the crowd with humor, charisma and a set of classics that bare his barbed tongue (among others, “Sorrow, Tears and Blood,” “Zombie” and “I.T.T./International Thief Thief”).

Jones’s use of choreography in various Africanized production numbers that illustrate Kuti’s struggles speaking truth to power doesn’t always hold together. For one, the singer’s legendary womanizing (he died of AIDS in 1997) is glossed over, a glaring misstep given the number of female dancers onstage as well as the women who influenced him (his mother, a Black Panther girlfriend from Los Angeles). Ultimately, Fela! struggles with itself, a reminder that a good concert is good theater all by itself.