UK Edition
Review
Tina The Musical at Aldwych, review - this joyful, lungs-bursting show is simply the best
Born in the USA, made in England. That’s the thesis of this slickly choreographed, beautifully designed and roof-raisingly well-sung bio-musical about Tina Turner, charting the R&B turned rock goddess’s progress from Nutbush, Tennessee via the school of hard-knocks to the tip-top of her profession: the highest grossing female concert performer in history after recording Private Dancer in London in the early Eighties and in doing so, rebooting her career.
Rumoured to have taken an £8m advance, the evening proves an Anglo-American triumph. It combines the aesthetic finesse of British director Phyllida Lloyd with the political instincts of Memphis-born, Olivier nominated playwright Katori Hall - and boasts a tour de force performance by American actress Adrienne Warren.
Seldom off-stage and required to execute multiple in-the-blink-of-an-eye costume-changes, Warren is entrusted with singing hit after hit; there are 23 numbers in total. She has to honour those smokey vocals, summoning the kind of heft you’d swear could tip trucks, but she can’t allow any hint of karaoke tribute.
The near-impossible expectation is that she doesn’t just ‘play’ Turner, but somehow ‘becomes’ her. Yet that precisely - magically – is what seems to happen.
Her achievement is to honour the recognisable mannerisms – the pout-strut, the legs-astride battle-position, the frenzied mane-shaking of the lioness in full roar – but root them in a spontaneous, sincere, soulfully aching personality. Offering more smiles than smouldering scowls, Warren radiates a joy in the act of singing her heart out that’s wholly infectious.
As with the Carole King musical Beautiful – the last big show at this theatre – the empowering trajectory affirms how a talented female artist found the resolve to go it alone, and reaped the benefits. In this case, the initial helping-hand for the woman born Anna Mae Bullock rapidly became a bruising fist: in the Sixties-set sequences, Ike Turner’s notorious philandering is kept to a minimum but there’s abundant simulated domestic violence. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith does what he can to prevent this volatile, possessive musician from being one-note nasty yet in Hall’s script, Mr T is almost demonised, driving his meek spouse into the near-fatal arms of Valium.
As with the Lloyd-directed mega-hit Mamma Mia!, part of the pleasure lies in anticipating when familiar numbers will land. Some follow the basic career chronology (the breakthrough solo River Deep Mountain High arrives during a Phil Spector-supervised recording session).
But Let’s Stay Together helps foreground the furtive relationship between the fledgling star and her first love (father to her first child also) saxophonist Raymond Hill; “Private Dancer” is ingeniously allied to her post-Ike period of penury; and “I Can’t Stand The Rain” serves to reflect the sodden melancholy of early 80s London - accompanied, as elsewhere in Mark Thompson’s often astounding set-design, by smart, suggestive video projections.
Self-evidently it’s not in the same league as, say, Hamilton but this jukebox musical boxes clever within its tight parameters. Even the bombast of We Don’t Need Another Hero (from Mad Max III) comes to carry a raw emotional charge, a candle-lit procession snaking through the auditorium as Turner grieves for the mother who so coolly, so cruelly abandoned her.
The evening is bookended by a 1988 concert in Brazil: our indomitable heroine first prepares to meet her army of fans, casting her mind back to the prayers of her childhood, then finally does so, rewarding them (and us) with a full lights-blazing, full lungs-bursting rendition of Simply the Best. It’s the obvious yet perfect climax.