Comments on: Fela! Broadway Magazine Review http://www.broadway.tv/blog/broadway-magazine/fela-broadway-magazine-review/ Broadway News and Broadway Tickets and Broadway Reviews Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:23:53 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 By: KJames http://www.broadway.tv/blog/broadway-magazine/fela-broadway-magazine-review/#comment-5203 KJames Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:31:23 +0000 http://www.broadway.tv/blog/broadway-magazine/fela-broadway-magazine-review/#comment-5203 "Though an effort is made in the production to draw parallels between Kuti’s corrupt Africa and modern day America, those attempts seem thin and half-hearted at best as they target comfortable villains like Haliburton or AIG, while ignoring the healthcare industry’s direct attack on healthcare reform, or the Auto industry, or financial service companies who benefitted from government bail-outs." This criticism seems to have missed the point of two different sequences from the show. In the earlier sequence, which covers Fela's sojourn in the US, the whole emphasis is on how the political situation of African Americans in the '60s was *not the same* as that of NIgerian Africans. It's not the parallels but the differences that were emphasized. And in the later sequence, in which various global powers (such as Halliburton and the IMF) are directly named and attacked, the emphasis is *not* on specifically American problems, such as health care reform, but on globalization and imperialism. Talking about health reform would have been irrelevant to the context. (Also, calling Halliburton and the like "comfortable" villains is a half-hearted bit of rhetoric: are we supposed to stop criticizing these villains *because* they've been villains for so long? Better to step up the criticism, I think.) “Though an effort is made in the production to draw parallels between Kuti’s corrupt Africa and modern day America, those attempts seem thin and half-hearted at best as they target comfortable villains like Haliburton or AIG, while ignoring the healthcare industry’s direct attack on healthcare reform, or the Auto industry, or financial service companies who benefitted from government bail-outs.”

This criticism seems to have missed the point of two different sequences from the show. In the earlier sequence, which covers Fela’s sojourn in the US, the whole emphasis is on how the political situation of African Americans in the ’60s was *not the same* as that of NIgerian Africans. It’s not the parallels but the differences that were emphasized. And in the later sequence, in which various global powers (such as Halliburton and the IMF) are directly named and attacked, the emphasis is *not* on specifically American problems, such as health care reform, but on globalization and imperialism. Talking about health reform would have been irrelevant to the context. (Also, calling Halliburton and the like “comfortable” villains is a half-hearted bit of rhetoric: are we supposed to stop criticizing these villains *because* they’ve been villains for so long? Better to step up the criticism, I think.)

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