Boyz II Men hope to start new chapter at Mirage

The Boyz part of the name might be a distant memory — wishful thinking at this point — as they repeatedly rehearse the energetic choreography to their new show opener, “Beautiful Woman.”

But the work ethic is part of the Men half of the name. It has been for close to a quarter century. Nate Morris is momentarily sidelined by a cramp but shakes it off and gets back in there.

Boyz II Men have been wanting a home on the Strip for years, and this is their chance.

The vocal trio made a big push with a Christmas show at the Flamingo in 2010. But nothing came to pass until ventriloquist Terry Fator decided to pare from five weekly shows to four at The Mirage this year, and spend more weekends out of town. Local producer Adam Steck helped the Boyz line up a proposal to do 78 shows spread across weekends starting today.

“We fit perfectly in Vegas for everything we do and everything we’re about,” Morris says as he pulls up a post-rehearsal chair with his singing partners Shawn Stockman and Wanya Morris.

“I feel like this is the next step for us,” Stockman says. “This is special for us, very important for us.”

The vocal trio has in practice been a casino act for years now. Boyz were even part of a group that included Donald Trump bidding for a license to build a ground-up casino in their native Philadelphia. Another bidder won out back home, and the project has since stalled. “Vegas is no slouch as a runner-up,” Nate Morris says.

The three spent their lean years working overseas and in U.S. showrooms. So a summer arena tour with New Kids on the Block and 98 Degrees comes with hopes of reintroducing them to casual fans, who may have lost track of a group whose biggest album, the 12 million selling “II,” came in 1994.

The summer tour “will get back into the swing of things as far as arena touring and get back in front of our fans who haven’t seen us in a long time to that magnitude,” Wanya Morris says. “Some of our fans didn’t even know we were still doing it.”

In fact, they never quit. Although bass singer Michael McCary wasn’t replaced after he left the group 10 years ago, the enduring trio is the rare case of the same lineup enduring since high school.

The three say their longevity might stem from the fact that they were a group first, friends later.

“We never really liked each other when we first started singing,” Nate Morris says of their days at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts. “We just started singing and it sounded good. Every day we started singing because it sounded good. After that everybody went their own separate ways.

“We fell in love with how we all sounded and we knew that was something we couldn’t get anywhere else. After that it was, ‘Let’s figure a way to make this thing work because it just feels good.’ We became friends over the last 21 years.”

In 1990, the group came to the attention of Michael Bivins, an alumnus of one of their influences, New Edition. He decided to manage them, outfitting the Boyz in what would become their signature preppy-casual look, complete with cardigans and bow ties.

“We’re from the hood, the ghetto. It was kind of a situation where if our friends saw us looking like this ... ” Wanya Morris says with a laugh. “It wasn’t something we could say no to because Michael Bivins was our manager, but we’re glad we didn’t resist. It became a part of Boyz II Men.”

“You see rappers even wearing it now, the preppy look, the suits and ties,” Stockman adds. “We’ve never abandoned it. This is not a trend to us, this is something we’ve always done, always will do.”

Before long, hits such as “End of the Road,” “On Bended Knee” and “I’ll Make Love to You” had the group playing to arenas full of screaming girls, twice at the MGM Grand Garden in 1995. Temptations were everywhere, but the three credit their late road manager, Khalil Rountree, for keeping their heads level and feet on the ground.

“He was placed in our lives very early and more like a father figure than just a road manager,” Nate Morris says. “He taught us how to speak to people with respect and not be bratty kids: ‘Keep your feet off the furniture’ and that kind of stuff.”

Rountree was killed in a Chicago hotel shooting during a tour stop in 1992. “We felt like we lost a big chunk of who we really were, and kind of had to live up to what the name of the group was, and we had to learn how to do these things on our own without our father being around,” Nate Morris says.

“That’s the guy (to whom) we attribute everything we are about other than the music part, because that’s something that’s God-given. But the way we do things in life, even the way we treat our families, our kids? This guy was everything to us.”

Through good times and lean times, Stockman says, “We saw groups we looked up to go through those meltdowns and we never really understood why.

“We understood that what happened to us was something special. All those things were amazing to us,” he adds.

“We’ve been on the road so long, we’ve been together with each other more than we’ve been with our families,” Nate Morris says. “We know more about each other than our mothers even know about us at this point.”

Perhaps because the group has three lead singers rather than a frontman with two harmony singers, there is “nothing greater than the whole,” Wanya Morris says. “We always came back to understanding as a group we’re blessed to build this situation. There is nothing we could do individually that could stand ahead of that.”

Now the three hope to start a new chapter in a place that could turn out to be perfect for their situation: a memorable legacy of hits to get people through the door, but a showmanship honed from years of performing to keep them there.

“I think being ‘old school’ was to our advantage,” Stockman says. “We understood what the industry was. We’re some of the few people that are still around who can say that we’ve seen the transition, we saw the change.”

Although not intentionally invoking bad “End of the Road” metaphors, Wanya Morris says, “We pride ourselves at this moment in being the type of people who, we’re actually riding in our own lane right now. We have our own direction in which we go. We stay true to our music, we stay true to the vibe that we came up with. We’re not going to veer from that because of the way the music industry is going. It’s been working so far. ... We’re not going to look back, we’re going to move forward.”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.