THEATRE REVIEW

MARCH 2025 | Volume 249

 

Tina Turner was an incredible talent, a singer and performer without parallel in the 1960s-‘70s soul era as part of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. After leaving Ike, she made a comeback in the 1980s as a solo act. Her superstardom endured through 2009, when she retired from show biz. She could belt and scream a song like no one else, and her dance moves on stage, her leggy glamour, was uniquely Tina.

Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, like most musical theatre bios, offers a Cole’s Notes version of the life and career. Audiences want to hear the hits and see how well the actors can replicate the real people. On those counts Tina is a mixed bag. It has some other things going for it, but only in moments does the show suggest the incredible dynamism that was Tina Turner.

We meet Anna Mae Bullock as a kid who loves to sing, growing up in Nutbush, Tennessee. Deserted by her angry mother (Elaina Walton) and raised by her grandma (Deidre Lang), now teenage Anna Mae eventually joins her mother and sister in St. Louis, where she meets charismatic Ike Turner (Sterling Baker-McClary). Ike is a talented but frustrated musician who feels that he never gets the credit he deserves. He also has serious anger issues.

Anna Mae joins his band and quickly becomes the lead singer. She has a romance with one of the guys, Raymond (Maurice Alpharicio), and has his baby, but Ike, who has had her change her name to Tina Turner, pressures her to marry him. Sixteen years and another baby later, they’re still together, though Ike brutalizes her, never pays her, and screws other women. Finally, she beats him up and runs away.

In Act Two we follow her post-Ike life, leading to her solo success, the new love of her life, and the songs most of the audience wants to hear: “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” “(Simply) The Best.”

Tina is played by Jayna Elise, who looks nothing like the real Tina but has a voice that can blow the roof off. Supported by four women who play the Ikettes, Elise shakes her tailfeathers and blasts the funk (“A Fool in Love,” “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”) and the far less interesting ‘80s and ‘90s hits, but rarely gets to show the Tina who could also groove beautiful soul ballads. An exception is her duet with Raymond on Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”

I found much of the second act drawn out and anticlimactic. A lot of the acting, as is often the case in music-historical theatre, is cartoonish, as if “that old stuff” is a kind of joke, not worth respect. I hate that, and blame the writers and directors, not the actors themselves.

Conversely, there are genuinely powerful moments in the show—when Tina stands up for herself in the face of Ike’s violence, audience members talked back to her with encouragement, and cheered. And the subject of racism hits hard in a couple of scenes: when the band, on the road in the South, is forced to sleep in their car (they call it “the Motel Mississippi”), when redneck cops threaten them, when a record executive passes on recording Tina, calling her the N-word.

These are shocking moments that feel as real as Tina’s passionate embrace of the sometimes mediocre songs that she turned into masterpieces through the force of her immense talent.

 

 

 

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