Dreamgirls [Liner Notes]

Among the adjectives welcoming Dreamgirls when it opened on Broadway December 20, 1981, was a phrase defining Michael Bennett's new musical as a "seismic jolt." More than just easy journalism, deadline praise sent quickly sizzling off a hot typewriter, these two words are likely to turn out prophetic.

At a time when the Broadway musical has been described as static or worse, terminal, at a time when Broadway's sources have wormеd in on themselves with borrowеd scores and hand-me-down reprises, Dreamgirls has rediscovered a bypassed origin: the mainstream music of America.

In the past it was usual for great composers of popular music to turn their talents to the musical theater, but now the turning has grown sporadic, slack, sorry. There has been—for a long time—a separation between what might be called streetsongs and theatersongs, a separation between what we, the vox populi, actually sing and the Broadway style. Streetsongs (lyrics running through the head usually on the stimulus of either good, bad, or muddling romantic experiences) were personal, immediate, comforting, if not downright helpful. Theatersongs (lyrics remembered usually within a show's context) were casual, clever, distancing, if not outright remote. One of the things that Dreamgirls sets out to do—and does with close and steady insistence—is to thread popular music through the needle of the Broadway style.

Another thing Dreamgirls accomplishes is a staging concept with the rapidity, if not the fluidity of the movies: quick transitions, shifting locations, close-ups, reverse angles, wipes, super-impositions, overlapped action, even—in subliminal effect—something close to depth in focus. Name it. It's there on the live stage in the blinking of an eye. And the theater's sparse and limited vocabulary suddenly finds itself in the wide open library of the cinema. Michael Bennett's direction, which employs live gliding towers (designed by Robin Wagner) staffed with swiveling lights (arranged by Tharon Musser), is far more than a seasonal novelty in a sensational evening. Its inspiration is the wind of the future.

Dreamgirls has occasioned a lot of easy talk which says that its music has merely marched out of Motown, a parade of parody. The musical's narrative, which traces the rise of three black singers from Chicago who begin as The Dreamettes and magnify into The Dreams, was said to be the story of The Supremes and Diana Ross. The plot covers 10 years, 1962-1972, and there are, of course, similarities between the fictional rise of The Dreams and the fact of the Supremes, although the pivotal character is not the sultry Diana Ross look-alike but, rather, a heavy-set lead singer, Effie Melody White. Effie White is pushed into the background when The Dreams' aggressive agent shapes his trio into a sleeker, commercial look. It's true that The Dreams' new, glossy image, as it develops, might easily pass as a photocopy of The Supremes.

According to Dreamgirls' composer, Henry Krieger, the Dreams/Supremes image itself is responsible for at least two "simplistic assumptions about the show": the first being that Tom Eyen's book simply spells out The Supremes' story; the second being that Krieger's score (lyrics by Tom Eyen), is purloined Motown. The score, and its inspiration, are more complicated than that.

Krieger states bluntly that the show's songs "are nowhere close to the Motown sound." To meet the demands of Eyen's book and Bennett's directorial approach, Krieger wanted to achieve "an affectionate musical mirror of the 60s, an amalgam of the period." The Supremes were part of the era so, naturally, the group figures in the scheme. But so do Etta James, Aretha Franklin, the Drifters, Benny King, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Krieger specifies Etta James as the musical model for Effie White, notably in the searing, masochistic "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," which closes Dreamgirls' first act. Krieger mentions other (earlier) influences on his work: Fats Waller, Ray Charles, and Chopin ("for the romance, the fitfulness, the sadness, the energy, the pathos, the full gamut of emotional reality"). Krieger's thesis is persuasive: "Saying that Dreamgirls is Motown, and letting it go at that, is a layman's quick knee jerk reaction."

If Dreamgirls is unconventional in its approach, its story is the fairly conventional American Dream of Making It Big in Show Business ("Big Dreams" was once under consideration as the show's title). But with, of course, unconventional complications.

Spare with spoken dialogue, relying heavily on recitative, Eyen's narrative backgrounds The Dreams' career with the dense, avaricious afterworld of show business itself, with the kind of cutthroat creativity that makes stars out of shyness and shakes gold from plastic. The three girls—Effie White (Jennifer Holliday), Deena Jones (Sheryl Lee Ralph), Lorrell Robinson (Loretta Devine)—begin as a promising trio, and trusting friends. As The Dreamettes, green from Chicago, eager and wide-eyed, they sing "Move (You're Steppin' On My Heart)" in a talent show at the Apollo Theater in New York. The girls lose this first bid for fame, but their talent attracts a sharp agent, Curtis Taylor, Jr. (Ben Harney), whose venal business tactics, yet to be revealed, are subliminally suggested in "Steppin' To The Bad Side." Curtis convinces a popular star, James Thunder Early (Cleavant Derricks), to hire his hastily collected new clients.

Worked in here, and using the first recitative in the show, is a starting song. "Cadillac Car," which not only creates a kind of instant social history of upward mobility in America (with a Cadillac as the preeminent status symbol) but also underscores this history with the struggle of blacks to keep their originality in the force of white standardization. A line in the song goes: "If the big white man can make us think we need his Cadillac to make us feel as good as him, we can make him think he needs our music to make him feel as good as us."

Curtis falls in love with Effie, then, bartering her talent with a convincing argument ("Family"), moves Deena into Effie's lead spot. Curtis shifts his affections to Deena. Effie, deeply and defiantly in love with her man, rages with gospel fervor through the sear and pain of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." The first act closes with a blow upon a bruise, with Jennifer Holliday piercing the anguish in Effie's song until the heart breaks. It's a great moment in the Broadway musical theater. Listen to the final cut on side one.

Dreamgirls' second act covers 1970 and 1972. The Dreams, with Effie replaced by Michelle Morris (Deborah Burrell), are an international hit, their records at the top of the charts. But personal, as well as professional, wars are still being waged. Lorrell has long been pursued by Jimmy Early, who's married and can't seem to make the break from his wife ("Ain't No Party," "I Meant You No Harm"). Jimmy's club act has been badly compromised; his star is waning. Simultaneously, Deena wants to leave The Dreams and make it in the movies, an ambition at odds with Curtis's plans, and which eventually divides them ("When I First Saw You"). Slowly but determinedly Effie, who now has a child, is making her difficult way to a comeback ("I Am Changing"). Once again she crashes against Curtis, who tries to destroy her revitalized career by outclassing her hit single ("One Night Only") with a version by The Dreams. Effie out-maneuvers her adversary, and reclaims her lost dream of stardom. Dreamgirls ends in a triumphant reunion of The Dreams, with Effie White in a guest star appearance. The reunion is also The Dreams' farewell performance as a group ("Hard to Say Goodbye, My Love").

The dedicated, go-for-broke approach that motivated the Dreamgirls creative team from the beginnning (four workshops, then a prolonged, pre-Broadway tryout in Boston) has further motivated the making of this original cast album. Rather than follow the standard recording procedure, a single, long, heavily-mixed Sunday spent in a recording studio (which is the slipshod way most musicals make it from footlights to platters), Dreamgirls has been tracked over a full six-week schedule. To achieve the highest fidelity possible, each side of the album has been limited to a maximum of 24 minutes. Most shows are packed into 35-to-40 minutes on a side, which makes for inferior reproduction. As a landmark musical stimulating the lyric theater, Dreamgirls is likely to have a similar effect upon future original cast recordings.

Through Dreamgirls' detailed and dramatic graph of life's ups-and-downs, through the promise and destruction, through the bitterness, heartbreak, the joy, the eventual triumph, there is a simple, echoing apostrophe, a taciturn, philosophic refrain that puts everything in perspective. The refrain sings, almost idly yet right on target: "Show business, it's just show business."

Dreamgirls may just be showbusiness, but it seems destined to be the musical of the 1980s.

—Kevin Kelly
Drama critic, THE BOSTON GLOBE