Hits galore will thrill their followers – however this Temptations tribute lacks soul… PATRICK MARMION critiques Ain’t Too Proud

AIN’T TOO PROUD – THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE TEMPTATIONS (Prince Edward Theatre, London) ***

DANCING AT LUGHNASA (Olivier Theatre, Nationwide Theatre, London) ***

PRIVATE LIVES (Donmar Warehouse) ** 

Ain’t Too Proud is a listing musical in additional methods than one. Not only a round-up of awesomely nice tunes by the legendary R&B vocal group from Detroit, it’s additionally a listing of historic footnotes yoked to the self-affirming CV of The Temptations’ founding member, Otis Williams.

Followers like me will likely be simply excited by the group’s well-known psychedelic soul with its trademark of tinkling cymbals and murmuring wah-wah pedals. All that advanced out of popsicle numbers like My Lady and Simply My Creativeness. However it’s the darker songs, like Ball Of Confusion and Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone, that thump you within the photo voltaic plexus. These and plenty of extra — together with a bonus Supremes medley — are carried out with bodily verve and vocal dexterity by a solid lead by Sifiso Mazibuko as Otis.

And but the most effective catalogue musicals, like Mamma Mia! or Jersey Boys, make extra of their tales. Right here we simply get a smattering of historic occasions, from Martin Luther King to the Vietnam Struggle, augmented by a predictable plod from the early days of the group.

In 1963, they signal to Motown — with Smokey Robinson as producer. Then it’s a medley of intercourse, medicine and damaged relationships. Williams, the narrator, can be wont at hand down self-help proverbs, resembling: ‘Let go of 1 dream to get to a different.’ These pearls make it onerous to keep away from the impression he’s certainly the management freak different band members describe, together with Mitchell Zhangazha’s annoyed falsetto Eddie Kendricks.

Guided by the phantoms of wealth and fame, his failed marriage and part-time relationship along with his son, who died at simply 23, are the one self-criticism licensed.

Much more fascinating — however sketchily drawn — is the person thought-about by many to be the voice of The Temptations: Williams’ nemesis, David Ruffin (Tosh Wanogho-Maud). He received them their first No 1 hit, My Lady, in 1965, earlier than going off the rails — skipping gigs, beating his spouse and elbowing his manner on stage after he’d been fired.

Following Ruffin’s loss of life from a crack cocaine overdose in 1991, Williams parsimoniously observes: ‘He deserved a greater exit.’

Different members, together with Cameron Bernard Jones’s affable Melvin Franklin and Kyle Cox’s combative Paul Williams, are saved in test by Williams’s model of occasions.

And though choreography is tightly executed over the 2 hours and 40 minutes, it doesn’t a lot exceed elastic martial arts strikes, as if The Temps have been preventing off invisible foes in The Matrix.

And but, as a well-drilled tribute act, who can doubt these wonderful performers — or the enduring energy of songs like Ball Of Confusion? Actually, that’s what the world is as we speak — hey, hey.

Dancing At Lughnasa is a story of 5 sisters residing in north-west Eire in 1936: all spinsters, all with unsure prospects. Pictured: McSweeney and O’Hanlon

Brian Friel’s Donegal reminiscence play can fairly moderately be carried out as pleasantly sentimental, however I longed for Josie Rourke’s revival to lose the soft-focus and zoom in on the deep scars of its characters’ personal agonies.

Dancing At Lughnasa (it’s pronounced as a fusion of a water closet and the American house company: ‘Lavatory-NASA’) is a story of 5 sisters residing in north-west Eire in 1936: all spinsters, all with unsure prospects.

The eldest, Kate (Justine Mitchell), is a trainer who pins her religion on church dogma. Gutsy Maggie (Siobhan McSweeney) desires of a wild man to go together with her Wild Woodbine cigarettes. And the youngest, Chris (Alison Oliver), has a son out of wedlock — performed by a middle-aged man (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) who’s additionally the narrator, recalling his childhood.

Center sisters Agnes (Louisa Harland) and Rose (Blaithin Mac Gabhann) take what solace they will from dance music blaring out of a dysfunctional new Marconi hi fi, whereas envying the sexual emancipation received by Chris in her on/off relationship with supposedly Welsh salesman and ballroom dancer Gerry (Tom Riley).

And for color — extra color — we’ve got Ardal O’Hanlon as a retired missionary priest within the throes of dementia, who’s been enchanted by pagan non secular customs in Uganda.

The tone of Friel’s 1990 drama is very similar to Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, with an author-figure casting a wistful eye over his misplaced previous. And there’s greater than a nod to Anton Chekhov’s masterpiece of provincial Russian melancholia, Three Sisters.

However Rourke’s manufacturing emphasises the nice and cozy glow of nostalgia, stained by the characters’ stringent Irish wit.

Mitchell catches Kate’s suppressed self-loathing because the sisters’ self-appointed matriarch, whereas McSweeney puffs on fags and cheerfully warms her bared bottom on the kitchen vary. And Oliver makes a neatly self-possessed younger mum. However on the Olivier’s area stage, they’re additionally obliged to play to the gallery, with Riley’s Gerry projecting a Fred Astaire jollity and O’Hanlon touched (nonetheless) by the comedian ghost of Father Ted.

I used to be left pining for the gut-churning battle of loss and longing that may make Friel’s writing an ideal deal stronger.

Siobhán McSweeney and Ardal O’Hanlon attend the press night time after occasion for Dancing at Lughnasa at The Nationwide Theatre on April 18

Meryl Streep within the 1998 interval drama tailored from Brian Friel’s 1990 play

‘Sure girls needs to be struck often, like gongs,’ says a person who seems like a gent, thinks he’s amusing, however is definitely a brute.

It’s a line from Personal Lives, Noel Coward’s tragicomedy of appalling manners, judged so jarring that it’s typically lower.

Not so in Michael Longhurst’s horribly unfunny revival, which scrapes away the brittle artifice of the writing and divulges the ugly fact of home abuse. Here’s a couple for whom preventing, verbal and bodily, is foreplay. However when the red-hot break-ups lead into passionate make-ups, all is forgotten.

Violence ended the wedding first time spherical between Stephen Mangan’s Elyot, whose thuggery comes with a lifeless smile, and Rachael Stirling’s horny, snarling Amanda.

And right here they’re once more, assembly by probability on neighbouring resort balconies, about to start their second honeymoons. In a flash they realise that swapping fireworks and friction for cosiness and conventionality was an enormous mistake. These narcissistic egomaniacs want nobody however one another.

Designer Hildegard Bechtler’s resort overlooks an ocean of darkish material. Gloomy and ugly, true: however it does permit for a beautiful coup de theatre. Whisked away, it reveals Elyot and Amanda, entwined on a sofa in Paris, crazily in love another time. She throws him a grape. He catches it in his mouth. They dance, hoot with laughter earlier than, as soon as once more, they’re biting chunks out of each other.

Any profitable Personal Lives have to be propped up by well-defined jilted spouses. Coward noticed them as ‘ninepins to be knocked down’. Too simply right here. As Elyot’s new squeeze, Laura Carmichael’s Sybil is as ladylike and anaemic as Stirling’s Amanda is unconventional and bloodthirsty.

Sargon Yelda’s Victor, Amanda’s dumpee, over whom she towers, underdoes the pomposity and overdoes the dullness. Buttoned up in brown, he barely registers.

Coward’s quicksilver genius holds flippancy and seriousness in good stability. On this heavy-handed manufacturing, a champagne comedy falls flat.

GEORGINA BROWN