FLINT, Mich. — The music that defined a generation and helped put Detroit on the cultural map is taking center stage at the New McCree Theatre this February.
“The Motown Story,” which opened Feb. 6, traces the rise of Motown Records from its humble beginnings in Detroit to its eventual move to Los Angeles, highlighting the artists and songs that shaped one of the most influential music labels in American history.
“It’s about that fantastic journey that Berry Gordy took, creating Motown and galvanizing all of that talent to converge into hit after hit,” said Charles H. Winfrey, Executive Director of the New McCree Theatre. “It was really a rags-to-riches story.”
Through music and storytelling, the production revisits Motown’s golden era, when acts like The Temptations, The Supremes, The Miracles, The Marvelettes, and Martha and the Vandellas ruled the charts and crossed racial and cultural boundaries through sound.
Winfrey described the show as a chronological musical journey, reacquainting audiences with Motown’s early years in Detroit and following its evolution through the label’s eventual departure from the city.
“It’s almost like a musical history lesson,” he said. “You’re moving through the music, through time.”
While “The Motown Story” wasn’t originally planned for Black History Month, Winfrey said the timing feels right, especially as the theater continues its mission of using art to educate as well as entertain.
“When we mention the word ‘history,’ people shy away,” Winfrey said. “But you don’t really know yourself until you delve into your history. It raises your consciousness.”
The New McCree Theatre, founded in 1970 as part of a federal Model Cities initiative and named after Flint’s first Black mayor, Floyd J. McCree, has long used performance as a tool for cultural preservation and community dialogue.
After a period of closure, the theater was reinvented in 2004 and now stands as one of only nine Black theater companies in the country that own their own building.
Beyond “The Motown Story,” Winfrey is also developing a future production centered on the Elaine, Arkansas Massacre of 1919; a historical drama examining racial violence, sharecropping and Black resistance in the Jim Crow South.
For now, Winfrey hopes audiences will come out, sing along and reconnect with a soundtrack that helped shape Black culture and the civil rights era itself.
“Motown is history,” he said. “But it’s also joy. It’s resilience. It’s who we are.”
“The Motown Story” is running now through Feb. 28 at the New McCree Theatre, located at 4601 Clio Rd. For more details and to purchase tickets, visit thenewmccreetheatre.com.