SIMPLY THE BEST
‘Tina’ musical’s alternating leads have their own takes on the icon
How big of an icon is Tina Turner? Put it this way — it takes two (as the song says) to portray her in the stage production “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.”
Not both at once, mind you. Stars Naomi Rodgers and Zurin Villanueva alternate nights portraying the singer, a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee revered for both the music she made for an inspiring life in which she overcame abuse at the hands of her late ex-husband Ike Turner to launch a multi-platinum solo career that lasted into her 60s. It’s an epic story, both draining, cathartic and triumphant all at once.
“Tina,” partly based on Turner’s 2009 memoir “I, Tina: My Life Story,” was developed for London’s West End, where it opened in 2018, and came to Broadway the following year. The latter was nominated for 13 Tony Awards, winning two — including Best Actress in a Musical for Adrienne Warren. That means Rodgers and Villanueva have big high-heeled shoes to step into as Turner, and during a recent combined Zoom chat from the “Tina” tour stop in Philadelphia the two spoke about their similarities and differences in portraying Turner “The Best” that they can…
Villanueva says she “wasn’t quite sure what an actor was” as a child growing up in Brooklyn but was “very much into theater.” She began with dancing and started singing later. “I stumbled into musical theater as a teenager, and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a place where you can do all three?!’ I want that’,” adds Villanueva, who graduated from Howard University and has performed on Broadway
in “The Lion King,” “Mean Girls,” “The Book of Mormon” and “Shuffle Along” as well as on TV programs such as “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisle,” “Insatiable” and the upcoming Netflix show “Murder Mystery 2.”
Rodgers “started at a very young age, singing in church and then was introduced to theater by her mother. She joined the touring cast of “Frozen” after graduating from the American Music and Dance Academy in New York, and while she enjoys her “Tina” costumes Rodgers does “miss walking around in a huge ball grown and twirling and feeling pretty (in ‘Frozen’). But I also feel very powerful in the (‘Tina’) costumes. They’re outrageous!”
The two have slightly different backgrounds with Turner and her music.
Rodgers — “very young here” at 23 — “grew up doing karaoke a lot with my family (in Virginia Beach) and Tina Turner songs were always the go-to.” For Villanueva, Turner “made her way into the soundtrack of my childhood without me really knowing it. I wasn’t really that aware of it until I got this role and started hearing some of her songs and, ‘Oh, I do know this.’ I knew a lot more of it than I realized; it was kind of in the background of my psyche.”
Through preparing for the “Tina” musical, meanwhile — which included watching the 1993 biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” — both have become familiar with Turner’s story.
“Of course we know the movie backwards and forwards,” says Villanueva, who performed during America’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Detroit. “There were a lot of details I didn’t know from her early life, and I didn’t know how she actually went about getting her No. 1 hit (“What’s