Performance: Edinburgh, Scotland
05-Aug-06
NOT JUST MO’ OF THE SAME
By Paul Whitelaw
A group of black tenors celebrate 400 years of African-American music with their Scottish debut this weekend. As PAUL WHITELAW discovers, they are set to challenge a number of musical stereotypes, performing a variety of genres, from opera to gospel and the blues.
The Mo’ Tenors prepare for their Scottish debut in Edinburgh this weekend. Picture: Neil Hanna
It’s a dank weekend in July, and even thundering rainstorms of near Biblical proportions can’t detract from the energy that flows through New York. I’m here to interview big-lunged musical lads the Three Mo’ Tenors, although I spend much of my time running from lightning and wringing out my trousers while watching Seinfeld re-runs in my hotel room. On the day of Tenors’ performance at East 59th Street Theatre, a man in Queens is hit by lightning.
The Tenors’ show, which makes its Scottish debut this weekend, is billed as a rich celebration of 400 years of African-American music, performed by three musical theatre stalwarts; James Berger, Duane A Moody and Victor Robertson. There are really six Mo’ Tenors, both groups of which will be alternating throughout their Edinburgh run. This time-share is born of physical necessity, as the taxing vocal constraints placed upon the performers would render it virtually impossible for one group to survive a month of nightly performances with their vocal cords intact.
The show itself is an all-singing, all-dancing sashay through opera, gospel, blues, soul, jazz, Broadway and contemporary R&B, and although it’s a little too “jazz hands” for my taste, it’s still a fun piece of easily digestible theatre. The Three Mo’ Tenors certainly have voices to rattle the rafters, especially Robertson, a small man with a voice the size of Trump Tower. Berger possesses a convincing soul croon, and, when the trio join in harmony, it’s exceptional. Admittedly, Moody, with his incessant eye-rolling and vaguely camp gyrations, is reminiscent of Ainsley Harriot, which rather undersells the gravitas of his version of Nessun Dorma.
“People say opera’s dead – opera’s not dead,” declares Kennedy when we meet at the theatre the next day. “It’s the connection that’s dead. You take the right element, the right people who look more like them, then maybe they’ll think it’s OK to like you.” The “them” he refers to are, in some sense, the children from areas like the Bronx, to whom the Tenors often perform workshops. African-American tenors are extremely rare, and certainly few black children must dream of a future in opera.
These three youngish men intend to change that. “I think because the show encompasses so many different styles, there’s going to be a plethora of people who just enjoy jazz more than gospel and so on, and yet when they come and they’re part of that entire range of music, they get introduced to a particular style that they may not have been introduced to before,” says Moody.
“The message is it can be done,” continues Robertson. “But only a few people can really pull it off legitimately. It doesn’t seem like we’re going outside of our boundaries, we’re all comfortable with any style of music, and if that in itself isn’t a selling point, I don’t know what is.”
Robertson sees this show as a major musical coup: “It’s really rare to have three guys together like this. We happen to have really forward voices, and they resonate higher than the average singer trying to do this. So it just so happens that we blend just right.”
With lengthy backgrounds in musical theatre, the tenors have, perhaps surprisingly, never worked together before. Robertson won an Ovation Award in 2005 in his role as Rodolfo in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of La Bohème in Los Angeles, a role he recently reprised to great acclaim at the Royal Albert Hall. Berger, a member of the Washington National Opera, appeared at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago in a production of Porgy and Bess, and Moody has appeared in countless operas around the world. With this amount of combined experience, the Three Mo’ Tenors’ show is nothing if not abundantly slick.
Conceived and directed by former dancer Marion J. Caffey – who is currently preparing to unleash his new Three Mo’ Divas upon the world – the show is, as Moody describes it, “very high energy, very family-orientated”, and could conceivably prove a hit with audiences around the world. The three talk seriously of using Edinburgh to expand on the all-important “European, Far Eastern and Australian markets”, while producer Willette Murphy Klausner argues that the show operates beyond mere family entertainment.
“This is an excellent way to get a diverse crowd into the theatres normally supported by a very limited segment of the community – white upper-class older people,” she says. “We want to show, first of all, that blacks can sing opera, but also that they have access to all those worlds. Very few black tenors rise to the top, there’s a very small pool of talent, which is why it was so difficult to find singers for this show who could not only sing opera but all these other styles, too.”
Well, almost. Although the Three Mo’ Tenors seem comfortable with opera and Broadway, and Berger can do a smooth approximation of soul and jazz, they falter with the blues, which they over-sing to the point of parody. Also, the “new-school” segment, which sees them donning baseball caps like Russ Abbott in a 1980s rap parody, is tossed off quickly, as if they can’t wait to get back to the proper singing. But when the unashamedly confident Victor Robertson demands of me, “have you ever seen a show that covers all these kinds of music?” the answer has to be “no, not really”.
“It takes a different mindset to pull off these different styles. We call it the decathlon of musical theatre,” Berger chuckles, while Robertson grabs one last chance to assert how much mo’ talent these men have than their contemporaries. “And we can really deliver with the actual talent. It’s a unique experience.” Moody is slightly less dogmatic: “We want to take the audience on this music journey with us – on this love train, baby.”
A few hours before I leave, waiting for my socks to dry, I catch a TV news report about Pavarotti, one large part of the original Three Tenors, being wheelchaired from hospital following cancer treatment. A clip of the great man on stage highlights the contrast with the Three Mo’ Tenors. It’s difficult to imagine most mainstream musical performers competing with the sheer effervescence and range of these men.
Difficult, too, to imagine a city more operatically energetic than New York, floods, lightning, jazz hands and all.
• The Three Mo’ Tenors are at Assembly at St George’s West, Shandwick Place, until 27 August (not Tuesdays), (£7-£14, dial 0131-226)