Joyous nostalgia with foot-stompin’, finger-snappin’ sing alongs of some of the most memorable music of an era.  It’s all part of Ain’t Too Proud, the story of the rise, challenges, and sunset of the Temptations, perhaps the greatest rhythm-and-blues vocal group of all time.  But more than that, it is also a story of multiple personal tragedies to members of the group and their loved ones, many self-inflicted.  The story unfolds against an unkind political landscape rife with racism at the individual level and racial incidents at the national level that scarred the American psyche.  Even in their peak popularity, the Temptations dealt with shooting incidents, and as one of them sagely noted, “You never know who’s singing along to your records and hating you.”

Who better to document that history through his group biography than the founder, leader, and only surviving original member of the Temptations, Otis Williams.  And who better to translate it to the stage than one of America’s finest playwrights, Dominique Morrisseau, who not only comes from Detroit, which is the home of the Motown music saga, but who had already produced a rich trove of plays about Black life in the city.

Proudly, the musical returns to the region where the Tony Award winning musical was birthed by Berkeley Rep in 2017.  Transcendence Theatre with its Broadway Under the Stars series, now housed at the Field of Dreams in the town of Sonoma, offers a captivating production that entertains with exemplary singing and musicianship as well as fine acting throughout extracts the emotional power of the personal conflicts that befell the group.

The Temptations emerged at Barry Gordy’s Motown Records.  Along with The Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and The Four Tops, they were the foundation of Motown music.  In addition to a likeable sound, Gordy assured that the groups presented images that would make white people feel comfortable supporting their music.  All of the groups competed to get assigned songs from the stable of Motown songwriters, most notably, Barrett Strong & Norman Whitfield and Holland, Dozier, & Holland.  In the end, it was The Temptations that rose to the top, and many fine tunes were crafted for them.

The play consists of many well-designed, fast-moving vignettes, punctuated with 30 high energy songs from the Motown catalog, some poignantly relating to the storyline.  Most were performed by The Temps, but some by others, including a medley from the Supremes and chart topper “War” by Edwin Starr, which was denied the Temptations out of concern that the song would taint their image.   The story begins with the collaborations that led to the fivesome from Detroit who became the “classic” Temptations.  The inflection came in 1964 with their first chart hit “The Way You Do the Things You Do” and their first Number 1, “My Girl,” both sweet numbers nicely performed on stage, as were all of the famous songs.

There was a pre-existing familiarity among the five that also extended to the whole Motown Records community, many of whom knew one another as teens.  While everything seemed copacetic at the outset, success often breeds competition, ego, excessive behavior, and contempt.  Behind the public façade of the smiling, uniformly dressed, highly polished performers lurked a turbulence that contributed to the destruction of most of the players.  Victors write history, and in this case, survival was winning.  The conciliatory but determined Otis Williams lived to tell the stories, which in the musical, his highly effective portrayer, Conroe Brooks, conveys directly to the audience.

Although he depicts himself as the adult in the room, much corroboration validates that Otis was the leader who always put the group first and that most of the others went off the deep end in one way or another.  The vocally gifted but self-centered and self-damaging David Ruffin (Kyle Parks) seemed to have inherited demons which tormented the group and himself.  At the other extreme, the milk-drinking Paul Williams (Tyrick Wiltez Jones), who was also the creator of the early Temptations dance moves, became an alcoholic, perhaps in response to his diminishing status in the group.  In both cases, a sympathetic audience has difficulty comprehending what they did to themselves and wishes to change history.

Kwame Michael Remy portrays Eddie Kendricks and excels at his penetrating falsetto, which played big in lead singing both before and after Ruffin’s stint with the Temps.  While Kendricks became the architect of his own downfall, Melvin Franklin, the bass singer played by Topher Yengbeh, remarkably winsome in a professional debut, was committed to the Temptations like Otis, but he became diminished by rheumatoid arthritis.

With each depiction of coordinated song and dance, the performers strut their stuff as if the real Temps.  Between the on-point vocal performances that had much of the audience lip-syncing along much of the time came the conflicts that were exacerbated by being on the road, which led to inordinate togetherness and temptations of every kind.  Probably the least vulnerable, Otis still suffered a divorce and missed most of the growing up of his son Lamont.  When he promised Lamont as a teen that he would now have time, the son reacted by saying, “The only thing that you can re-wind is a song.”

Solid acting and singing, great music, and abundant drama are supported by fine theatrical design.  Vasthy Mompoint directs an immense undertaking with great skill.  Other special kudos go to Music Director Richard Baskin, Jr., who deals with a vast array of harmonic arrangements for groups and chorus as well as orchestration.  Lighting Designer Paul Hudson and especially Sound Designer Wes Shippee best all of the special obstacles of dealing with an outdoor production.  Perhaps because of the many different venues to be represented, corners seemed to be cut a bit in the set design, and some of the period wig looks were a bit cheesy.  Neither of these, however, were major distractors.

Transcendence deserves a special shout out for its courage for two reasons.  Sonoma’s already lightly populated area has a very low percentage of Black residents, so that a core audience is lacking.  And since the large cast is 95% Black, the company must cast a wide net and incur all of the extra expenses of hiring from other markets.

Happily, a near capacity audience was in attendance at opening, and audience response was overwhelmingly positive.

Ain’t Too Proud, with music and lyrics from The Legendary Motown Catalog and book by Dominique Morrisseau based on the account The Temptations by Otis Williams with Patricia Romanowski, is produced by Transcendence Theatre and plays at Field of Dreams, 151 1^st Street West, Sonoma, CA through June 28, 2026.