Powerful tale of Tina that’s simply the best
TINA – THE TINA TURNER MUSICAL Aldwych Theatre, London ★★★★★
THERE were two Tina Turners at the Aldwych Theatre last night. One was the real one, sitting in the stalls (and clapped loudly when she took her seat).
The other was on stage, in the tiny, muscular, power-packing person of Adrienne Warren who takes the title role in this biographical musical.
Dimples to kill. An impish, insistent stage personality. And a voice by Pratt & Whitney. That voice, I tell you: it could reduce the very citadel of Jericho to rubble. It is as big and growly as the real Tina Turner in her lionmane strutting heyday.
This show is a great deal better than most jukebox musicals. It is not just a collection of hit songs interspersed with prosaic dialogue.
The music has been moulded to fit the story of Anna-Mae Bullock (as she was born in 1939) and her rise from a broken home in Tennessee.
In late girlhood she was sent by her grandmother, who had been looking after her, to rejoin her estranged mother and sister in St Louis. There she met singer Ike Turner, the brute who became her husband for 16 years.
I was expecting an opening number with pzazz and whistles. Instead a profile of peak-fame Tina gives way to a scene of her father preaching to a church congregation, leading to a lowish-key Nutbush City Limits.
OK, there is a touch of butcher’s gammon when the little girl’s grandma tells her ‘the ancestors will always be with you’ but any musical needs some emotional gravy. Soon the teenage Tina is ‘ spitting fire’ at Ike Turner’s microphone and for some reason (under-explored) she agrees to marry the drug-taking control freak.
Better Be Good To Me she sings. He ain’t. The zoned-out Sixties are recreated with kaleidoscope backdrops and pastel-backlit profiles.
Oddball record producer Phil Spector spots Tina’s potential and she records River Deep, Mountain High.
It is said she is ‘ James Brown in a skirt’ but she counters that maybe soul star Brown is ‘Tina Turner in pants’.
With Buddhism giving her the support Ike ( Kobna HoldbrookSmith) will not, Tina is ‘ a woman who does not break her promises, even when she should’. Any danger of the show becoming too gloopy is averted when she is whisked off to London by a new manager and the story receives a welcome dose of British humour – and Tina meets a new love interest.
He went on to become her husband and he was alongside her in the theatre last night. During the love scenes, the audience whooped and went ‘corrr!’ Wonderfully embarrassing for the star couple!
A strong band does well to be heard over Miss Warren’s amazing voice. With Private Dancer she simply becomes Tina in entirety. ‘I may be jumpin’ at the sun but I got long legs,’ she says. And even though she is short, we believe her.