Temptations jukebox musical coming to Tucson's Centennial Hall

Fitness watches weren’t a thing in the 1960s, which is too bad.

Broadway actor Michael Andreaus is sure that if he was wearing one while he was on stage as Otis Williams in the jukebox musical “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and the Times of The Temptations,” he would be clocking 10,000 steps a night.

“For sure, 10,000 sounds about right,” he said during a phone interview in early November from a show stop in San Jose, California. “I do wear watches in the show, but there was no Apple watch in the 1960s.”

There are only a few scenes in the 2½-hour bio-musical, which Broadway In Tucson brings to Centennial Hall next week, where Andreaus and his Temptations castmates aren’t singing or dancing or moving around.

In his role, which includes narrating the story of the legendary Motown band’s rise and fall and playing its founder, Andreaus has maybe five minutes all told where he’s not on stage.

That’s a far cry from when he played the iconic Motown producer/manager Berry Gordy when the national tour launched in December 2021. By the summer of 2022, he had switched to playing Williams.

“Going from (Gordy) to playing a person who is literally on the stage for all but five minutes of it and singing and dancing, it’s a big responsibility,” Andreaus said. “But it’s also a lot more fun. I get to have a little more creative expression and just dive into it a little bit more every night.”

“Ain’t Too Proud,” based on Williams’ memoir “Temptations,” follows the band’s rise from the streets of Detroit to Motown and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame against the backdrop of the racially-charged 1960s.

“I think Dominique Morisseau, who wrote the (script), she elevated this beyond what I think would traditionally be a jukebox musical. There’s just a richness to their story,” Andreaus said. “… Telling the story of these men against the backdrop of the racism that they experienced in the South and all of the interpersonal issues that they had and the individual demons they all seemed to face, I think that’s the thing that I come back to. I feel like there is something everyone can relate to in all of these men.”

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The jukebox part of the musical comes from nearly three dozen songs woven into the story, including the monster hits “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Shout,” “War,” “Get Ready,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “For Once in My Life,” “Gloria,” “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” “In the Still of the Night” and “The Way You Do the Things you Do.”

Andreaus, who grew up in Oklahoma listening to the Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations and other Motown greats, said his favorite song to sing in the show is “Cloud Nine.”

“There’s just a lot of fun dancing in that one. It’s really high energy,” he said. “It’s kind of our last hurrah, the reunion of the Temptations.”

He also likes when they sing “Just My Imagination,” a song that slows things down a bit. But the audience fave, judging by the volume of the applause every night, is “My Girl,” a “song that everybody knows so well and our David Ruffin — Elijah Ahmad Lewis — just sings it so well,” Andreaus said.

“It’s just one of those definitive Temptation songs so when everybody finally gets to hear it, it just strikes a chord with everyone,” he said.

Being cast in “Ain’t Too Proud” is a dream come true for Andreaus, whose career has included being in the Netflix series “When They See Us” and several regional and Off-Broadway shows — “Ragtime,” “Rock of Ages,” “Dreamgirls” and “Love and Yogurt” among them.

“Motown was that music that played in the house all the time. My mom would play it in the weekend morning when she was cleaning ... but The Temptations was the one we would always come back to,” he said. “I grew up listening to (The Temptations) and actually performed it for a little while with my brothers and friends. We had a little Motown group that we would sing some of the songs for community theater. ... I’ve always loved The Temptations. They’ve always been a staple in my life.”