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Dreamgirls

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Dreamgirls became one of the most popular new Broadway musicals of the 1980’s. From the very start, there was ambition to turn it into a film adaptation, but its seemingly massive scope and breadth made the execution almost impossible and was put in development hell for 25 years.

However, in 2002, the film adaptation of Chicago raised the bar for what could be possible in combining film elements with a predominantly stage-based musical numbers. Bill Condon, the film’s screenwriter, refines this novel approach and takes the helm as both writer and director of the long-awaited film adaptation of Dreamgirls, now available on DVD.

In the 1960’s, the Dreamettes, made up of the shy and beautifully feathery Deena Jones (Beyonce Knowles), the vocally dynamic Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), and the chipper background-blending Lorell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose), was a struggling Detroit R&B group looking for a break. After losing in a talent competition, charismatic car salesman-turned-fledgling record producer Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx) takes them under his wing.

Taylor first positions the talented ingénues as background singers for the dynamically wild R&B sensation James “Thunder” Early (Eddie Murphy). However, Curtis sees bigger and better potential for his fledgling acts.

He has Early dump his long time manager Marty Madison (Danny Glover) and polish out his sound to appeal to the white-bread mainstream, as well as acquire Effie’s brother, C.C. (Keith Robinson), as his principal co-songwriter. Curtis also reforms the girls into a headlining group called The Dreams, with the more glamorous and vocally benign Deena as the lead singer.

While The Dreams become a pop sensation, Effie begins to resent her belittled background status and is soon forced out of the group after butting heads continuously with Taylor. Soon enough, Curtis’s Rainbow Records turns into a multimillion dollar empire and Deena Jones soon overshadows The Dreams as a pop megastar.

However, by the 1970’s, turmoil ensues as the musically watered-down Early becomes crippled by drugs, the ousted Effie becomes alcoholic and destitute, trying to taking care of her daughter conceived with the record mogul, and Deena begins to feel trapped in Curtis’s tightly-reined professional and personal grip.

Dreamgirls is nothing if not a dazzling and extremely ambitious musical. The story is a grand and multi-tiered fictionalized pastiche of both the rise of Motown Records and R&B’s crossing over into the fickle, MOR world of white-bread American 1960’s and 1970’s pop in general.

The great story is boosted even further by an incredibly fantastic, first-rate cast. Jamie Foxx equally charms and