15th Season Opens With “Ain’t Too Proud”
By David Bolling
The Transcendence Theatre Company will launch its fifteenth season on June 12, with a newly-positioned stage to reduce neighborhood sound intrusion, and a Tony-winning, Motown musical melodrama, “Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations.”
If you’re under 40, and you’ve been living under a rock, and you don’t have a CD player (or know what a CD is), and your parents only ever listened to Doris Day, Bing Crosby or Lawrence Welk (who?), then you may need a musical introduction to the Godfathers of Soul music.
The Temptations, led by Otis Williams, wove intricate harmonies, synchronized, syncopated dance steps, stylish threads and successive strings of top 40 hits to become the heartbeat of the iconic Motown sound.
The Broadway show that was distilled from their collective life stories won a Tony Award in 2019 for Best Choreography, and their music – often called “the soundtrack of the Sixties” – is ageless, timeless, irresistible, guaranteed to make you want to get up and dance.
The entire cast of the show, appearing on the Transcendence stage, is (with one exception) Black, a cultural phenomenon and creative blessing in mostly white and brown Sonoma, and confirmation that the taproot of American music is African-American. The playlist for “Ain’t Too Proud,” is a musical history tour, including, “My Girl,” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “What Becomes of The Broken Hearted,” “Just My Imagination,” “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” “I Wish It Would Rain,” “Shout,” “Since I Lost My Baby.” The hits just keep coming.
And they’ll come rolling off the Transcendence stage a little more quietly – at least for go-to-bed-early residents of the Blue Wing Drive neighborhood a block away from the Field of Dreams. That’s because last year Transcendence consulted with representatives from the city’s Parks and Recreation department and the Field of Dreams, to work out a solution to sound intrusion. They hired a sound engineer to come measure the decibels in 2025 and decided to move the stage to the opposite side of Fazio Field. It now faces the wooded hillside of the Montini Open Space Preserve, where the only human development is a massive water tank.
Robert Rainwater, who manages operations for Transcendence, gives grateful credit to Field of Dreams and Parks and Rec personnel for preparing the field, making it secure for ADA concerns, and sculpting it for all-season use. “They put a tremendous amount of work into it,” says Rainwater, “They all felt this will be a much better situation. We’re hopeful the sound mitigation will be successful.”
Tickets for “Ain’t Too Proud,” and all Transcendence shows are available at transcendencetheatre.org, or by calling 877.424.1414.
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