Fela Kuti wasn't your average rock star. The father of Afrobeat ("the loping, polyrhythmic, funked-up groove" Kuti invented, in the words of rock critic Robert Christgau) was born to a well-to-do family in Nigeria but championed the poor. He liked to perform in his skivvies, smoking a joint.

In the 1970s, at the Shrine, his dingy, famed club on the outskirts of Lagos, young fans would flock to his shows to flirt and get high, but they were also encouraged to study Karl Marx and read about the plight of Africa in a makeshift library.

His music, an irresistible mash-up of American influences -- Sly and the Family Stone, Frank Sinatra, James Brown -- and African rhythms, wasn't just funktastic. It was revolutionary, his lyrics aimed like rifles at Nigeria's brutal and oppressive military regime.

Because Kuti was a showman with a conscience, a political peacock who didn't sound or act like anybody else, it stands to reason that a musical about his life would be as atypical as the man himself.

"It's very important that people not make assumptions about what the show is before they get there -- 'Oh, this is an African show, this is a black show, this is a whatever,' " said Bill T. Jones, who directed, choreographed and co-wrote "Fela!" The explosion of sound, movement and color is coming to PlayhouseSquare for a three-day run beginning Tuesday.]

"I think people need to be encouraged just to get into the room and let it speak to them. It is not your usual Broadway show."

And Jones is not your usual Broadway artist. With "Fela!" he brought the power of the pelvis -- the star of the West African dance style, as the New Yorker's Joan Acocella put it -- to the Great White Way in 2009. Audiences jumped to their feet and gyrated; critics swooned.

"It's hard to make West African dance look bad -- this is one of the great dance cultures of the world -- but oh, how good Jones and the dancers . . . have made it look," Acocella wrote.

The legendary choreographer earned a 2010 Tony for that glorious dancing in "Fela!"; the show won three Tonys in all and received 11 nominations.

The national tour has been garnering similar ovations. It doesn't hurt that pop diva Michelle Williams joined the cast as Kuti's American lover Sandra Isadore in late January, just before her sizzling performance at the Super Bowl with Beyonce and Destiny's Child. (Although Beyonce's husband, Jay-Z, is one of the producers of "Fela!" Williams got the role by auditioning "like everybody else," she said.)

View full sizeAdesola Osakalumi as Fela Kuti in the national touring production of "Fela!" "Fela always loomed for me large," said one of the show's creators, Bill T. Jones. "He was the epitome of what world music was. It was not folkloric. It was the way the rest of the world was responding to American pop culture, and Fela did it in the most distinctive and defining way."SHAREN BRADFORD

Jones said he found the subject of his celebrated musical "fascinating." Kuti traveled to Europe (he studied at Trinity College of Music in London) and the United States, where he was exposed to funk and jazz, as well as the Black Power movement, then brilliantly fused the new musical styles and radical discourse with his African sensibilities.

"This man was like a live wire trying to process colonialism, post-colonialism, capitalism -- all of these isms . . . so he was a rock star with a real difference," said Jones by phone from New York City, where he was on his way to meet Dr. Oliver Sacks. (Jones is helping to engineer Live Ideas, a weeklong festival featuring theater and dance performances built around Sacks and his influences, beginning April 17.)

"For a man who could be so doctrinaire about his politics and his worldview to actually have such whimsy and such playfulness in his persona, Fela redefined what we mean by rock star."

And it wasn't just Kuti's whimsical nature or militant heart that attracted Jones to his story. In 1978, Kuti married 27 women in a single ceremony.

"Oh, yes. He was a bit of a monster," said Jones, chuckling. "And I think you will feel that in the show." While Fela was suave and charming, he was also very willful. And Kuti's relationship with women?

"That is its own show," said Jones. "I don't do it -- somebody should make a show about those wives, not to mention his great mother. . . . He was a kind of spoiled boy, in a way. He was from the elite, the same elite that he critiqued so relentlessly for the rest of his life."

Kuti's mother,Funmilayo (played by classically trained soprano Melanie Marshall), is the catalyst for one of the most celebrated sequences in "Fela!"

In 1977, in response to Kuti's activism, soldiers stormed his commune, torched his recording studio and threw Funmilayo from a window. She died from her injuries.

In the show, during a phantasmagoric trip to the underworld in search of his mother's ghost, Kuti encounters spirits who blaze in the darkness.

"It's hard for stage artists to portray the afterlife," wrote Acocella. "Jones did the best job I've seen."

How did he evoke the afterlife with flesh-and-blood actors?

"We suggest a black-and-white world, where it had been all color before," said Jones. "And that's done with lighting and so on, and the costumes are all white, so they glow in the dark." (Those costumes, by Marina Draghici, won "Fela!" another Tony.)

Familiar terrestrial characters also transmogrify into deities.

"Everybody that you've seen all evening, these sort of louche characters, suddenly now are gods and goddesses attending to the goddess of rain," he continued. As for the movement, Jones was thinking about avant-garde ballet in Jazz Age Paris and "the fantasies of, quote, 'Africanism' and 'primitivism,' and then I just let it rip."

The whole otherworldly journey is "fueled by Fela's music," said Jones. "Very knowing, full of funk and yet full of horns -- someone said the horns are like hearing angry elephants."

A perfect collision

of culture, music That a pop star of Williams' wattage signed on to play activist Isadore -- another pivotal woman in Kuti's life -- has added yet another layer of intrigue to the production.

"When you see Beyonce's girl, one of Destiny's Child, up there singing the revolutionary words of Sandra Isadore," it's a strangely perfect collision of pop culture and classic African music -- a union, Jones said, he thinks Kuti would approve of. It's also a shorthand way for American audiences to identify with Kuti's sultry, incendiary world.

To prepare for the role, Williams consumed Fela bios -- "He wasn't just somebody making music, he wasn't just a musician staying up all night with a lot of women. He actually was fightin' for something" -- and spoke with the real-life Isadore ("we just had, like, girl talk").

In addition to her chart-topping hits, Williams is no stranger to musical theater, having appeared in the title role of Broadway's "Aida" and as Shug Avery in the national tour of "The Color Purple." Still, she said, "Fela!" is something special.

" 'Fela!' stands on its own, unlike any other show -- it's just a spiritual moment. It also has a lot of audience interaction," Williams said last week from Miami between performances. "If you think you're just gonna come there because you're a theater subscriber and just sit and watch -- no. You're gonna get up and dance."

Williams shook and shimmied like a pro in February's Super Bowl halftime show, but she doesn't do much dancing in "Fela!," though she loves watching from the wings.

"They don't know I'm rehearsing on the side of the stage. They don't know I'm gonna sneak in one of their numbers -- Kanye West 'em onstage one day," she said.

While "Fela!" played well on Broadway, overseas and is filling theaters in big cities, how are audiences in smaller markets responding to the unabashedly sexy show about the controversial musician who burned so bright and fast? (Kuti died of AIDS in Nigeria in 1997, at the age of 58.)

"That's a good question," said Jones, who doesn't travel with the tour.

Williams, on the other hand, has seen it all.

"I'll tell you the two liveliest cities were Charlotte [N.C.] and Schenectady, N.Y.," she said. "So there you have it."