Wed. April 25 - Sun. May 6

The hit musical about Nigerian musician-provocateur Fela Kuti closed on Broadway in 2011, after garnering 11 Tony nominations and three victories. You knew what would be next. A “Fela!” road road show. (In the interim, there was a live simulcast from London at the National Theatre which screened in Janauray at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre.) But it comes to Boston at the Cutler Majestic Theatre through May 6. Olivier and Tony Award-nominated actor Sahr Ngaujah reprises his lead role from Broadway. He is joined by Melanie Marshall and Paulette Ivory, who co-starred with him in the London production.
     Tony-winning choreographer, director and co-writer Bill T. Jones, told me the idea first took hold a dozen years ago, when Stephen Hendel, a New York commodities trader, fell in love with Fela’s music and story. Hendel and his wife, Ruth, a theater producer, got the ball rolling. Said Jones: “Many people have heard about this show - and I do think it’s an historic show ...Steve was convinced that Fela’s was the ‘greatest music nobody had ever heard of. He went looking for a director and he came to our mutual lawyer, and said I should do something on a legit stage in New York. Steve convinced him I would be a person that could tackle this story that very few people know.”

   Jones knew something about Fela. In the early 1970s, as a member of a collective called the American Dance Asylum – “a bunch of wild counter-cultural types in upstate New York” – he used Fela’s music and co-created dance routines to it.
    “The music never went out of my consciousness,” Jones said, “but it wasn’t at the fore. When this was offered to me, I educated myself.”
    Fela’s music – including songs like “Zombie”, “Army Arrangement” and “Coffin for Head of State” - was a mix of Afrobeat rhythms, James Brown-styled funk and radical, confrontational politics.
    Fela challenged the post-colonial dictatorships and repression in his country and was jailed and beaten by authorities. Fela was no angel. He was sexually promiscuous, a pot proponent, sometimes hot-tempered and irascible.

   “Not unusual for those sort of people,” Jones said. “The artistic world is full of them. He was first and foremost a composer and wonderful artist. But as a friend of mine said, ‘Great does not necessarily mean good.’ And he was this type of personality. I call him a sacred monster, like Josephine Baker, Muhammad Ali, Edith Piaf or Judy Garland. Selfish and demanding. But Fela was a thinker as well. I want people to look at him as a person who is striving for freedom and truth and what you have to be willing to pay to have it.”

    The musical takes place in 1978, in Fela’s Lagos nightclub, the Shrine. Jones and co-writer Jim Lewis’s challenge was to paint as full a picture as possible of Fela, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1997.
     “Jim took old interviews and press releases and made him come alive every night and interact with a live audience,” Jones said. “To make them understand who he is – how authoritarian he is, how funny he is, how sexy he his, how contradictory he is.  I want people to understand what an unbridled sense of outrage and possibility could look like in a person, and this is what Fela was.”
   But it is a musical, a two-and-a-half hour show with 26 songs and an equal number of performers. Jay-Z and Will & Jada Pinkett Smith are among the producers. We saw the first Boston show and it was kinetic, frantic, soulful and quite moving. There's humor, pot, life-and-death issues and incredible choreography. It goes in and out of being a simulated concert and whiile that may sound odd on paper (or on screen, I suppose) it was very sinuous. If the goal of theatre is to transport you, "Fela!" really scores.
   So, which musical celebrities have seen - and premably grooved to - "Fela!" Mick Jagger, ?uestlove, Janet Jackson, David Byrne, Ziggy Marley, John Legend, The Edge, Michael Franti, Steve Earle, Ornette Coleman, Alicia Keys, Femi and Seun Kuti, Diana Ross, Harry Belafonte, Beyonce, Stevie Wonder (maybe he didn't see it, exactly), Bruce Springsteen, Smokey Robinson, Mos Def, Karen O, Rita Marley and many more. Good company.
Ticekets: $123.50-$23.50. Thuesday-Thursday at 7:30 (except tonight, at 7), Fridays and Sundays at 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m.

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