This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Legal
Fela! producers sued by Kuti’s biographer
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 10 November 2010
Producers of the previously reported stage musical on the life of Fela Kuti have been hit with a five million dollar lawsuit from the late Afrobeat originator’s official biographer, who claims the show’s creators have ripped off his book.
Carlos Moore says he was approached by the makers of ‘Fela!’ in 2007 and offered four grand for the stage rights to his biography. Calling that offer “grossly insufficient”, he knocked them back, saying he’d need a considerably larger advance and a cut of any stage show revenues to agree to participate.
Moore claims he then heard nothing more before the opening of ‘Fela!’ in New York. The show, he alleges, is wholly based on his book, which was used by the musical’s creators Jim Lewis and Bill T Jones without his “knowledge, authorisation or consent”. He this week filed a lawsuit, claiming $5 million in damages.
Producers of the show, which is backed by Jay-Z and Will Smith among others and which opened in London last weekend, say they are shocked by the lawsuit, not least because Moore took part in the publicity junket that surrounded the show’s Broadway opening, during which he praised the stage show for its “tremendous accuracy”.
