The Temptations' 'Ain't too proud' on Broadway

Cholly Atkins, left, rehearsed with the Four Tops in the basement of the Apollo Theater in 1964.

Cholly Atkins taught Motown to dance. His moves get an update in ‘Ain’t Too Proud.’


By Brian Seibert
13 March 2019

Five handsome men, dressed sharp. Golden-voiced singers, each distinctly soulful, harmonizing on hit after hit. That they could also move well, smoothly executing snazzy, classy choreography, might have seemed extra. Yet it was essential to what made the Temptations exceptional and enduring. Think about it: Does anyone dance quite the way they did anymore?

Not really. Not even the extremely talented cast of “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” which opens at the Imperial Theater on Broadway on 21st March 2019.

Times change. The past can never be wholly recaptured. Those are themes in this jukebox musical, which tells the story of the Temptations from the perspective of Otis Williams, the sole surviving original member (and an executive-producer of the show). And deep in the second act, when consequences and regrets are starting to pile up, the actor playing Mr. Williams (Derrick Baskin) says, “Don’t nothing rewind but a song.”

Change can be lamented or embraced. Sergio Trujillo, the choreographer of “Ain’t Too Proud,” is the embracing type. “It was important to me,” he said before a recent preview performance, “that an audience that knows the Temptations is able to watch the show and think, ‘That’s what I remember.’ But it’s also important to look through the lens of today.” The question he asked himself was: “If I were choreographing for the Temptations now, what would I do?”

What he did was create choreography that is more intricate, stylistically varied and narratively sophisticated than anything the Temptations ever approached.

All the characteristic slides and pivots and gestures in relay are in there, but amid a whole lot more. So while “Ain’t Too Proud” honors the past, it also brings out differences between dancing in Motown back then and dancing on Broadway now.

The Temptations were not trained dancers. At first, they didn’t think of themselves as dancers at all. “We would just stand and sing, or sit and sing,” Mr. Williams, 77, recalled over the phone.

The show has fun with this fact in an early scene. Paul Williams (no relation to Otis Williams) tries to get the other guys to dance in their act and they resist, claiming they can’t. He has to convince them that the ladies will like it.

Paul Williams, who died in 1973, did give the Temptations their first moves.

In 1965, though, they started working with a professional choreographer: Cholly Atkins. He is not a character in “Ain’t Too Proud.” But that omission, presumably for narrative economy, has some historical justification. In his 2001 autobiography, “Class Act” (written with Jacqui Malone), Mr. Atkins says that Motown artists were often told to say that they did their own choreography. He was part of the behind-the-scenes operation.

That operation was called Artist Development, and it was a critical component in the vision of Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy. “Berry always wanted Motown artists to be more than recording artists,” said Shelly Berger, who became the Temptations manager in 1966. (He’s a creative consultant for “Ain’t Too Proud,” as well as a character in it.) And so the people hired for Artist Development were show-business veterans, there to teach the kids how to become versatile entertainers.

Mr. Atkins was a tap dancer. Born in 1913, he came of age when tap, a sibling of jazz, was at its cultural peak — ubiquitous in nightclubs, Broadway shows and Hollywood musicals. As a black man, Mr. Atkins found little success in segregated Hollywood; he dubbed tap sounds for white dancers, gave ideas to Eleanor Powell. But in New York, with Honi Coles, a virtuoso once considered to have the fastest feet in the business, he formed a great partnership.

Mr. Coles and Atkins were in the tradition known as the class act: suave, debonair, cultivated. They sang a little, told jokes, and danced in several styles. Their soft-shoe was recklessly slow, a nonchalant tightrope walk of graceful control and rhythmic exactitude.They toured with the big bands of Cab Calloway and Count Basie. They appeared on Broadway in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” in 1949.

But by then, the early 1950s, tap was falling out of fashion. It got a shove from the rise of rhythm 'n'blues and rock'n'roll. At places like the Apollo Theater in Harlem, a home for tap, R&B revues took over. Coles became the theater’s production manager, appalled by the teenagers with hit records and no understanding of theatrical etiquette as basic as how to bow. Mr. Atkins began to teach them.

Before long, word got around, especially when people caught what Mr. Atkins had done with Gladys Knight & the Pips. He was 30 years older than they were, and they called him Pop or Pops, names that stuck when Motown hired him as its official choreographer.

“Pops refined the Temptations,” Otis Williams recalled. “What he did was dramatic but more economic, so we wouldn’t overly exert ourselves but still could get across.”

Mr. Atkins called this technique “vocal choreography,” an art of moving for vocalists. It was dancing that accommodated a singer’s need to breathe and to get back to the microphone on time. In the right spots, it could be complex — feet following the bass line as voices sang a different rhythm. “But Pops would always stress, ‘Remember you guys are singers first,’” Mr. Williams said.

Mr. Atkins was a taskmaster (“like a drill sergeant,” Mr. Berger said), but he adjusted to the skills of each group. “Let the punishment fit the crime” was his motto. The Four Tops didn’t get much more than some windshield-wiper bending. The Pips, the Supremes and the Temptations got the works.

They were being groomed for “the smart rooms,” Mr. Williams said: supper clubs like the Copacabana, places where few black acts were invited. Along with their hits, they sang standards, and Mr. Atkins taught them routines with hats & canes. You can see the results in “TCB,” the Temptations’ 1968 television special with the Supremes, and especially on their 1969 special, “G.I.T. On Broadway,” an hour of nothing but show tunes.

Every time one of Mr. Atkins’s groups appeared on television — on Ed Sullivan, “American Bandstand,” “Shindig,” “Soul Train” — they were spreading the tap and jazz steps he had learned when he was young, keeping those moves in cultural circulation as another generation picked them up from TV.

He continued to choreograph for the Temptations until his death in 2003. By then, the group’s roster had turned over many times (there have been more than 20 Temptations). And the way the Temptations danced, once so current, had become a period style.

The choreographer Sergio Trujillo said he asked himself, “If I were choreographing for the Temptations now, what would I do?”

The choreographer Sergio Trujillo said he asked himself, “If I were choreographing for the Temptations now, what would I do?”CreditSlaven Vlasic/Getty Images

It was around that time that Sergio Trujillo, born in Colombia in 1963, began choreographing “Jersey Boys,” the 2005 juke-box musical about the Four Seasons. For research, he studied videos of the old TV shows, footage of all the old groups. Since the Four Seasons didn’t move much, he had a free hand. “What I created,” he said, “was like the Temptations more than anything.”

“Ain’t Too Proud” came with different pressures: “Can I live up to the legend of these great performers known for their dancing?” he asked himself. “With the confidence of having done other shows of the period” — “All Shook Up,” “Memphis” — “I let myself create with abandonment.”

First, though, he wanted to earn the audience’s trust. And so the opening number of “Ain’t Too Proud” (“The Way You Do the Things You Do”) is very old school. Some of the lyrics are pantomimed baldly (opening the schoolbook), and when the narrator affectionately mocks those lyrics for corniness, he could be speaking of the choreography, too.

Immediately after, the simplicity recedes. For Mr. Trujillo is tasked, as Cholly Atkins never was, with helping to tell a story, the plot of how the Temptations got together and what they went through. And over the course of the show, as the group’s music changes, getting funky or psychedelic, responding to the riots and assassinations of the late 1960s, the dancing also changes, turning harder-edged, angrier, more technically and emotionally complex.

Throughout, the base style — “sprinkled with period authenticity,” in Mr. Trujillo’s words — tilts contemporary: sharper, bolder in attack. The Supremes in this show pop their hips with much more sexual frankness than the demure originals would have been allowed.

Mr. Trujillo is also working with a different kind of performer. Ephraim Sykes, who plays David Ruffin — one of the group’s lead singers — trained at the Alvin Ailey school and danced in the junior Ailey troupe. He has mastered some of Mr. Ruffin’s signature moves: splits; tossing a microphone in the air, spinning, dropping to his knees and catching the mic. But he also does much that Mr. Ruffin never attempted.

“I try to push my body as far as it can go,” Mr. Sykes said. “But also, how cool can I make it? That’s period for me. You didn’t see them try. Even the tricks I do that David never did, I’m trying to keep it so cool that it looks like David could’ve done them.”

Dancing that hard and still having to sing as well as David Ruffin isn’t nearly as easy as Mr. Sykes makes it look. “Singers and dancers are taught to breath in opposite ways,” he said, one relaxing where the other tightens. “I’m trying to use my dance training with a singer’s mind.”

Part of that dance training is in communicating with the body. “How they walked, how they stood, the pride of the city of Detroit, the bop in their step — it says so much about their times,” Mr. Sykes said.

In “Ain’t Too Proud,” even when the Temptations aren’t doing a dance number — in scenes between Otis Williams and his wife, for example — the five men are often present onstage like a cool Greek chorus. Their physical presence shows how they were always in one another’s thoughts.

That’s the kind of metaphor present nowhere in the choreography of Cholly Atkins. But what it looks like is five guys snapping and lightly swaying, as Cholly Atkins taught the Temptations to do.

A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2019, on Page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: The Way They Move the Way They Move.