Chicago really doesn’t talk enough about Maurice White, the life force of the amazing band Earth, Wind & Fire, a long-lived, tightly wound and singularly eclectic entity that sold 90 million records, achieved global fame and reinvented itself numerous times. Even now, richly harmonic and danceable hits like “Fantasy” and “Got to Get You Into My Life” are as thrilling as when they spun on the disco floor. I’m listening to the former as I write. Seems like the least one can do in honor of White, whose touring career was ended by Parkinson’s disease and who died in 2016.
White’s life forms the spine of writer and director Daryl Brooks’ “Reasons: A Tribute to Earth, Wind & Fire,” the new show at Black Ensemble Theater. White was born in Memphis but spent his formative teenage years in Chicago, studying at the Chicago Musical College (now part of Roosevelt University), becoming part of Chicago gospel and the city’s blues scene, and working with Ramsey Lewis and Chess Records. White found fame in the disco era but he was by no means caught up in the “I love the nightlife, I love the boogie” whirl of his time. On the contrary, he was an artistic perfectionist and formative savant whose genius-level contributions went beyond the band named after the elements and extended to both production and composition, a sideline that included penning “Best of My Love” for The Emotions.
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Fans of Earth, Wind & Fire are turning the latest Black Ensemble tribute show into quite the hit; the Friday night performance I attended was packed to the gills. By people who knew their band, too. Gregory Stewart Jr. plays Philip Bailey, the vocalist whose famously expansive and thrilling range was also inextricable from the band’s sound. He speaks a line about how White, in an attempt to reinvent the band for a new era in the 1980s, found himself morphing too radically for the band’s core fans, attracting the criticism that the new “Earth, Wind & Fire” was not what people thought of as “Earth, Wind & Fire.”
“No it wasn’t,” loudly said a gentleman seated in house left, clearly a fan with a long and funky memory. It was a lovely moment and one indicative of the kind of mutual musical love fest that, over the years, has marked the best nights at Black Ensemble.
This is not a full-blown jukebox show, although I’d have thought White and this band deserved that kind of Broadway treatment. The book scenes drag a tad, and the vocals are not always perfectly tight. In fairness, this material is very hard to sing. Even the actual band, at least when I saw them live, had to work hard in halls and arenas to replicate the way its studio recordings sounded.
Still, pleasures here included an empathetic Christian Bufford as the “mature” version of White and a very impressive tour de force from Stewart as Bailey. There’s a surfeit of family drama (all familiar from stories of most stars) and not enough musical exploration of this phenomenal figure for my tastes. But you get the hits, all right, and Robert Reddrick’s ever-reliable band has not only grown in size but gives all it can to pump out that signature sound. “September,” to cite just one example, is recognizable from its first measure. What a legacy.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Reasons: A Tribute to Earth Wind & Fire” (2.5 stars)
When: Through April 30
Where: Black Ensemble Theatre, 4450 N. Clark St.
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Tickets: $56.50-$66.50 at 773-769-4451 and blackensembletheater.org