Ain’t Too Proud—The Life and Times of the Temptations, the new musical about the Motown vocal sensation was showcased on CBS Sunday Morning March 10 ahead of the their March 21 official Broadway opening.
Derrick Baskin, James Harkness, Jawan M. Jackson, Jeremy Pope, and Ephraim Sykes play the members of the titular male pop group on Broadway: Otis Williams, Paul Williams, Melvin Franklin, Eddie Kendricks, and David Ruffin, respectively.
As for the real Temptations, Otis Williams is the last living member of this incarnation of the group. “I knew we had something magical; I could tell by the way the audiences would react to us,” he told Sunday Morning, though he admits never thinking his story would end up on the Main Stem.
Book writer Dominique Morisseau, making her Broadway debut with Ain’t Too Proud, notes the relevance of their story: “Here we are at this moment in their story where these young men are in a moment in their nation that is in great civic unrest, trying to navigate who they're going to be as artists, coming from a city that is also in great civic unrest. I thought that's where we are right now; that's where we are once again.”
Pope, too, is struck by “how much they had to sacrifice to be who they are to get where they got.”
See inside rehearsals for Ain’t Too Proud, moments from the recording of the upcoming cast album, and more in the full video above.