Sate and Travis Knights in Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company's new concert production Detroit: Music of the Motor City.Dhalia Katz/Soulpepper Theatre Company
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- Title: Detroit: Music of the Motor City
- Created by: Frank Cox-O’Connell, Travis Knights, Andrew Penner
- Director: Frank Cox-O’Connell
- Performers: Beau Dixon, Travis Knights, Hailey Gillis, Andrew Penner, Sate
- Company: Soulpepper
- Venue: Young Centre for the Performing Arts
- City: Toronto
- Year: 2023
Detroit, it has been said, is just like everywhere else, only more so – a lot more so. Which is why, with Detroit: Music of the Motor City, the Soulpepper theatre company may have picked the best American city possible for a deep, gritty musical dive that matters.
The songs performed are mostly from Detroit, but the conceptual concert tells a broader story about urban decay and revival. Take the ebullient show-opening Dancing in the Street: “Callin’ out around the world,” is the first line of a universal rally call in which Detroit is pretty much an afterthought – “Can’t forget the Motor City.”
A whole lot of people did, though. In his terrific book Detroit: An American Autopsy, author Charlie LeDuff quotes a homicide detective: “It’s a dead city,” Mike Carlisle said.
Sate, Travis Knights, Hailey Gillis and Andrew Penner (left to right).Dhalia Katz/Soulpepper Theatre Company
That book is from 2013. Ten years later Soulpepper director Frank Cox-O’Connell and his troupe of singers, storytellers and musicians are here to say that Detroit has risen from the dead. I think they try much too hard making that case. The “we’re back” narrative is pushed with such puffed-chest pride it seems fed from the Detroit chamber of commerce. That comes toward the end of concert, though. The bulk of the show is more tough, political and thoughtful.
Automobile mogul Henry Ford is cast as something of a villain, offering Black workers only the most “dangerous, demeaning and dirty” jobs. Flashed archival images contrast a pipe-smoking white man driving a Thunderbird with shots of the grubby work conditions in Ford’s factories. The version of the Motown hit You Keep Me Hangin’ On is brooding – more Vanilla Fudge than Supremes.
Ford had his assembly lines and Motown record label maestro Berry Gordy, Jr. had his as well. The latter mixed his pop records to sound good on the car radios of the former. The Soulpepper version of The Tears of a Clown was arranged with circus organ atmosphere.
Beau Dixon, son of a Detroit preacher, performed Stevie Wonder’s anti-Richard Nixon screed You Haven’t Done Nothin’ and What’s Going On.Dhalia Katz/Soulpepper Theatre Company
People not only danced in the streets in Detroit, they burned them down. After the city’s 1967 riot, Gordy moved the Motown offices to Los Angeles. In any story about Detroit, racial tensions and politics cannot be ignored. (Actually, they can: Gordy did not want to release Marvin Gaye’s protest song What’s Going On. Motown’s bouncy, tambourine-tapping cheer was an escape from the strife of the era.)
In Detroit: Music of the Motor City, Gordon Lightfoot’s riot-referencing Black Day in July was presented sombrely and theatrically by Andrew Penner against images of the violence. Beau Dixon, son of a Detroit preacher, performed Stevie Wonder’s anti-Richard Nixon screed You Haven’t Done Nothin’ and What’s Going On.
With an ode to hip-hop pioneer J Dilla, performers Sate and Travis Knights cleverly paid tribute to the city’s urban music legacy, while commenting on Black citizens who stayed in a gutted city that many whites left behind. The song? Nowhere to Run.
Hailey Gillis’s poignant solo version of Eminem’s Lose Yourself.Dhalia Katz/Soulpepper Theatre Company
Multiple genres of music were on display, done with superb arrangements and mostly fine singing. Hailey Gillis’s poignant solo version of Eminem’s Lose Yourself was cathartic. Rock music was represented by the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army.
One of the closing songs was I Want You Back, about second chances and the regret experienced over leaving a partner. It was a love song when the Jackson 5 sang it in 1969, and it was on the Soulpepper stage as well, Detroit being the object of affection.
Soulpepper’s Detroit: Music of the Motor City continues at the Toronto’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts through Aug. 19.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)