Broadway backstage musical -- not, that is to say, backstage on Broadway but backstage in Motown -- charting the breakthrough of R&B into the pop mainstream in the Sixties, more specifically the rise of a girl group called the Dreams (rhymes with Supremes), and attendant heartbreaks, breakups, downfalls, and assorted other banalities. True, a musical can get away with a banal storyline if the music is good, but these Broadway-ized soul tunes are as insipid as they are incessant. It seems it's not easy to write another "Where Did Our Love Go?," another "Come See about Me," another "My World Is Empty without You," another "You Can't Hurry Love." And the one familiar number, the one unforgotten number, the big abandonment solo of former American Idol contestant Jennifer Hudson (big voice, big figure), screams out for earplugs if not a muzzle. Neither is it easy, evidently, to be another Aretha Franklin. Beyoncé Knowles looks glamorous enough as the Diana Ross diva who metamorphoses into disco queen Donna Summer (under the Svengalian guidance of the Berry Gordy stand-in, Jamie Foxx); and the period clothes and hairdos -- something near a beehive on Eddie Murphy when we first meet him, higher and higher than Jackie Wilson -- are enjoyable as expected. Writer and director Bill Condon, who adapted the screenplay for Chicago but whose own directing credits run to Gods and Monsters and Kinsey, shows it's not easy to be Stanley Donen. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.