Star of Tina Turner musical on her fight for success
In the new Tina Turner musical, a star is born. Adrienne Warren tells Julia Llewellyn Smith how she channels the idol’s spirit
The first time Adrienne Warren laid eyes on Tina Turner she was standing in front of the grande dame herself, playing the iconic singer in an early “workshop” version of a musical about the star’s life.
“It’s the role of a lifetime. I grew up with Tina’s picture on my wall, saying I wanted to be the next Tina Turner and there she was, in front of me,” laughs Us-born Warren, 30. “I didn’t want to meet her before the performance because I was frightened I’d lose my focus, and I didn’t even dare look at her until we got near the end.
“Then I thought, ‘One day I want to be able to tell my future kids and grandkids that this happened’, so I looked and there she was, just singing along. At the end, I just collapsed in her arms and started crying.”
Warren’s emotional response was matched by Turner’s delight. At the first night of Tina: The Tina Turner
Musical at the Aldwych Theatre, in London, she told the audience: “I’ve found a replacement… I can really go and retire now.”
The critics agreed. Tina is Warren’s first big lead role, but her performance, which has been described variously as “stupendous”, “unstoppable” and “astonishing”, suggests the arrival of a major new talent.
“[Warren] doesn’t just ‘play’ Turner, but somehow ‘becomes’ her,” said the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish, awarding the show five stars. The musical has enjoyed a rapturous reception from audiences and, on the night I watched it, I was blown away by Warren’s ability to capture perfectly both Turner’s powerful vocals and unique dance moves, including the Amazonian “power stance” and her continual running up and down stage, without in any way producing a karaoke performance.
It is also an achievement from a purely physical point of view. Warren is required to perform 23 numbers, eight times a week, during a twoand-a-quarter hours show in which she barely exits the stage. “At the end [ just before performing a riotous Turner medley] I really have hardly anything left,” she says. “But as soon as the lights hit the audience, I see everyone’s faces and energy and I think, ‘That’s why we’re here, girl. Dig deep, here we go’.”
Warren has had to dig deep in another way, too. Turner’s life story is gruelling – she endured a tough childhood in Nutbush, Tennessee, and an abusive marriage to the violent and bullying guitarist and band leader Ike Turner. Portraying these periods of Turner’s life has taken an emotional toll.
“Those scenes [with Ike] gave me a few difficult moments in rehearsals,” says the charming and ebullient Warren. “The more I got to know the real Anna Mae Bullock [Turner’s real name], the more difficult it became to hear about the abuse she went through. She was no longer just the icon that is Tina Turner, she was like my mentor, someone I was growing to love.
“Reading her autobiography, I would weep at these awful things, like how Ike would throw a pot of boiling coffee over her face and then throw her on stage or often punch her in the eye for no reason,” Warren continues. “I would think, ‘How could someone have gone through that and come out on the other side a warrior and a champion and an angel?’ ”
Now 78, and living in Switzerland, Turner was initially resistant to the idea of a musical about her life. “She wasn’t keen!” smiles Warren, sitting in her dressing room. “She didn’t really know the world of musical theatre and it’s hard to trust your life story to anyone, especially a story like this.”
The show’s producers and its director Phyllida Lloyd, the force behind the Abba musical Mamma
Mia!, talked her round.
“They were incredibly sensitive and worked closely with her to make sure she was as comfortable as possible with the process,” Warren says.
Turner attended many rehearsals with her second husband, the German record executive Erwin Bach. During breaks, Warren bombarded her idol with requests for “her secret”. One of these secrets was a strict diet; during a tour, Turner eats a “hearty Southern breakfast with lots of grits [porridge]” but then only snacks until after her performance. Warren is following the same regime – eating nothing but highprotein foods like nuts all day – and then having dinner after the show. Warren also discovered she had much in common with Turner. Although the actress’s background is more privileged than Turner’s, both grew up black in America’s South (Warren in Hampton Roads, Virginia), and both had fathers who were preachers. This gave her the courage eventually to ask Turner about her wretched relationship with Ike, whom Turner married reluctantly aged 23. He treated her so brutally that after one assault she tried to kill herself by swallowing 50 Valiums. Friends urged her to leave, so why did she stay with him for 16 years?
“Back home, there’s a real Southern behaviour that things happen and you just stick your chin up and keep going,” Warren says. “That’s ingrained at a very young age, especially in an African-american because so much happens in the black experience in America that you are just forced to keep progressing with your day.
“Her suffering informed her performances 100per cent. There are a few scenes in this show when I go through something extremely emotional and then I have to perform right after, sometimes with tears in my eyes. The motivation to get through that performance is, ‘I have to do this because Ike is right behind me and there is an audience here who have come to see me and I will not let him or them see me fail’.”
Does Warren relate to that battle-on mentality? The actress went to a performing arts school in Virginia (where her mother is the executive director), before doing a degree in acting in New York and then winning a Tony nomination in 2016 for her role in the Broadway musical Shuffle Along.
“Oh yeah! As an African-american woman, you’re the bottom of the totem pole,” she says. “When I was growing up, my father always said to me, ‘You have to be twice as good as other people, because you are black and because you are a woman.’
“So many incredible things have happened in the past few years, especially in the arts,” she continues. “But look what’s going on in my country right now with police brutality – I call it criminality – and race relations. It’s very obvious we still have a long way to go.”
In the show, Turner, in her midforties, single and without a recording deal, is dismissed by a record-company executive as an “old n----- broad”, a line that elicits a horrified gasp from audiences. “That really happened,” Warren attests. “It’s very interesting to hear the British gasp. Being from America, that word’s not that shocking; so to see how shocked people are by it here gave me a little hope.”
Warren, as Turner, declares on stage that she wanted to be considered on a par with rock legends such as Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger (“She taught Jagger how to dance! He came backstage to find her and she showed him her moves,” Warren laughs).
Does Warren think that status has been achieved?
“She will be remembered and this show is helping do that,” she says.
The show, which took a rumoured £8 million in advanced bookings, is strongly tipped for a Broadway transfer. There, Tina would be just the latest in a long line of what Warren calls “bio-musicals” (she dislikes the term “jukebox musical”, which she thinks demeans the show’s hardhitting book by Olivier-winner Katori Hall) about women, including Carole King’s Beautiful, Gloria Estefan’s
On Your Feet, Donna Summer’s Summer and a forthcoming musical about Cher.
“Whether you like jukebox musicals, bio-musicals, call them what you like, the fact is these incredible women are finally getting their story told,” Warren says. “Don’t you think it’s about time?”
Tina: The Tina Turner Musical is at the Aldwych Theatre, London WC2. Tickets: tinathemusical.com
‘I would think: how could Tina go through all that abuse and emerge a warrior and an angel?’