76 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019
Turner’s triumph as a feminist hero exists apart from her music, in her life.
THE THEATRE
PROUD TINA
A new jukebox musical about Tina Turner comes to Broadway.BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD A. CHANCE
T
oward the start of a 1993 recording
of “Proud Mary,” Tina Turner—
who, by then, had been performing the
number for decades, across the globe—
gives a charismatic, gently teasing fore-
cast of the song to come.
“We’re gonna take the beginning of
this song and do it easy. But then we’re
gonna do the finish rough,” she says.
“That’s the way we do ‘Proud Mary.’”
Her voice, sharp and feline and cun-
ning, rushes forward, tossing each syl-
lable into a fast-moving current, until
she stops to hold a choice word—easy;
rough—up to the warm light of her at-
tention. Her diction, in its variance,
mirrors what she’s disclosing about the
song. Somehow the road map does
nothing to dissipate the impact of the
moment when the rolling thrum of
guitars that dominates the first half of
“Proud Mary” gives way to horns blast-
ing out that melodic line, and the men-
tal image of Turner spinning in tight
circles, wig ablur, arms tutted out like
twin cranes, tassels floating away from
her body, arrives. What we lose in tonal
and rhythmic suspense we gain in a
more primal kind of anticipation. Yes,
it will get rough, eventually—but when,
and just how rough?
A similar thing happens when we
hear Turner’s life story. Most of us know
it in its broadest contours. Born AnnaMae Bullock, as a child she picked cot-
ton on her family’s sharecropping farm,
in Nutbush, Tennessee, and pined for
her mother, who fled Turner’s abusive
father. In the first two decades of her
career, her success was linked inextri-
cably with her musical partner and hus-
band, who physically abused her. The
question, when the story is being told
onscreen or onstage, is never whether
these vicissitudes will be included but
how brutally, and to what representa-
tional end.
Even when Turner’s music is part,
or most, of the promised package—as
it is in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musi-
cal,” up now at the Lunt-Fontanne, di-
rected by Phyllida Lloyd, with a book by
Katori Hall, Frank Ketelaar, and Kees
Prins, and with seriously impressive
choreography by Anthony Van Laast—
it’s her life that delivers the dramatic
shape expected from art: tension and
release, fall and climb, pain and possi-
bility. This makes Turner perhaps sin-
gular among pop artists. Usually we
have to employ a kind of textualism—
combing lyrics and gestures for a cor-
ollary in reality—to assign to our stars
moral, cultural, and political values. Or
an artist makes bold-sounding declara-
tions, or endorses electoral candidates,
or embraces high-profile causes. With
Turner, even given all the innovation
found in her records, the triumph is lo-
cated in the life; her status as a femi-
nist hero is stubbornly extramusical—
it lives somewhere much past art, and
beyond statements.
It’s a paradox, then, that it was a pop-
cultural representation—the 1993 movie
“What’s Love Got to Do with It,” star-
ring Angela Bassett as Turner—that
made Turner’s political importance clear
to generations too young to have tracked
her entire career, and made her iconog-
raphy complete. For more than two de-
cades, Bassett, whose performance as
Turner is perhaps the most brilliant and
haunting of her career, has dominated
the collective imagination with respect
to Turner, and, in many ways, has made
Tina Turner’s art a mere corollary to
Anna Mae Bullock’s life. Turner’s most
famous songs—“Proud Mary,” “What’s
Love Got to Do with It,” “Simply the
Best”—now sound to my ears like auto-
biographical anthems, meant as a score
instead of a corpus of their own.