‘Dreamgirls’ is enjoyable, but no showstopper

It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since I first saw “Dreamgirls” on Broadway. The sold-out performance had only a few standing-room-only slots, and I didn’t regret buying a ticket. Standing was more like levitating. Those two and a half hours just shot by.

At the time, it seemed impossible that it would take more than two decades for this expertly staged show to become a movie. From the beginning, it seemed a natural. And hadn’t a similar 1976 film, “Sparkle” — which also told the story of an African-American singing trio that rose to fame in the 1960s — already paved the way?

In the early 1980s, the Boston Globe’s drama critic, Kevin Kelly, wrote that Michael Bennett’s original production of “Dreamgirls” accomplished “a staging concept with the rapidity, if not the fluidity, of the movies.” He cited the “quick transitions, shifting locations” and the sense that “the theater’s sparse and limited vocabulary suddenly finds itself in the wide open library of the cinema.”

Quick facts Starring: Beyonce Knowles, Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, Jennifer Hudson  Director: Bill Condon Run time: MPAA rating: PG-13

In spite of such enthusiastic claims for cinematic potential, a decade zipped by without a “Dreamgirls” movie turning up in theaters. In the early 1990s, the AIDS drama, “Longtime Companion,” paid tribute to the show with a delightfully off-the-cuff sequence in which Stephen Caffrey danced to the title song and mouthed the words to the original cast recording.

Then, nothing — until writer-director Bill Condon finally put it all together, hiring a brand-new cast made up of marquee names (Eddie Murphy, Jamie Foxx) and one sensational newcomer (Jennifer Hudson) in a role that always seemed designed as a show-stealer. Perfectly cast, dynamically performed but choppily edited, the result is a fascinating hybrid: more than a photographed play yet somewhat less than a satisfying movie musical.

Condon’s screenplay is filled with opportunities for the actors, who can always be counted on to pounce on them. Foxx dares to make himself thoroughly unlikable as the chief villain, Curtis Taylor Jr., a seductive Detroit car salesman who becomes a talent manager for the Michigan-based trio, the Dreamettes. He poisons everything when he replaces the gifted but combative and slightly overweight lead singer, Effie White (Hudson), with the more svelte backup singer, Deena Jones (played by Beyoncé Knowles, who makes this passive-aggressive diva’s every move understandable).

Eddie Murphy is explosive as James “Thunder” Early, whose flamboyant, reckless performing style is matched by his off-stage indulgences with drugs and women. Keith Robinson smoothly convinces as Effie’s frustrated songwriter brother CC, and Anika Noni Rose makes a strong impression in the relatively unrewarding role of the trio’s other original member, Lorrell Robinson, who is forced to watch the Dreamettes being reshaped from a distance.

Whenever the characters start talking about the importance of family, you know they’re really admitting that this particular family of performers (and their exploiters) is on the verge of collapsing. The long-simmering tensions among unequal members propel the characters through a couple of decades, as the music business comes to terms with segregation, payola and, in one startling scene, the Detroit riots.

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Condon’s commendably honest script never strays far from the essential ugliness of the story, filled as it is with betrayals, naked ambition and cowardly showbiz manipulation. Yet the picture is an up-and-down affair, glorious at times, inexplicably flat at others.

Partly this is because the songs, by composer Henry Krieger and the late lyricist Tom Eyen, haven’t aged as well as the music of the Supremes, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin and others whose lives and performances inspired the storyline. The addition of four new Krieger songs doesn’t help.

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