THE NEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019 77
The great benefit of this situation is
clear: we learn from lives, and every saint
needs a story. But, because Turner’s can-
onization has proceeded within the lim-
its of commercial entertainment, her life
often seems at risk of being objectified
in the way that can happen with a song,
or a scene from a blockbuster. When-
ever I hear the rapper Jay-Z, in a guest
verse on a song by his wife, Beyoncé,
flippantly drone, “Eat the cake, Anna
Mae”—a line from “What’s Love Got
to Do with It” that comes during one
of the movie’s most humiliatingly vio-
lent moments—I recoil. I wonder if the
magic of the movies—the semi-perma-
nent stamp that some pictures make on
the mind—might chip away at Turner’s
hard-earned gravitas, just as surely as,
initially, it helped build her myth.
“
T
ina,” a genuinely entertaining
jukebox musical with some trou-
ble at its edges, has this odd, precari-
ously balanced mixture of life and art,
politics and spectacle, as its burden.
Maybe its creators were wise, then, to
organize the story around Turner’s reli-
gious experience—her childhood in the
rural black church, her turn to a life-
long, cherished Buddhism. The show
opens with a temporal swirl: the adult
Tina (Adrienne Warren) sits wearing
a Corvette-red leather dress, her back
to the crowd, rasping out a mantra, as
her very young counterpart (a charm-
ing Skye Dakota Turner, no relation
to Tina) sits through a jubilant mu-
sical number at church, unable to re-
strain her voice, despite the chiding
of her mother. Skye Dakota Turner is
a wonderfully vivid performer; there’s
humor in every facial move and bodily
gesture, and she sings with precocious,
echoing focus, like a bird perched on
a cathedral’s upper balcony.
That opening image, whose surreal-
ism gives way to a more or less straight-
forward, chronological slide down the
time line of Tina Turner’s life, feels
like an attempt to reunify Turner and
her work, and to give a hint as to their
source. Some soul-deep fountain pro-
duced both. Tina grows up, and War-
ren, a powerful singer and song in-
terpreter whose reputation deserves
to grow after this performance, takes
over. She gives little glimmers of im-
personation, especially when she sings,
but mostly avoids distracting mimicry.
The trouble comes when this musi-
cal’s version of Anna Mae Bullock meets
this musical’s version of Ike Turner
(Daniel J. Watts). The real Ike Turner’s
very name—through a pop-cultural pro-
cess not unlike the one that turned Ti-
na’s into an emblem of long-suffering
resilience—is now almost synonymous
with cowardly violence and petty bul-
lying; his pioneering role in the devel-
opment of rock and roll has been all but
eclipsed by his notoriety as a sadist. No-
body mentions Ike and means to refer
to the Fender bass named for him. But
here, somehow, likely because Warren
is so good, and because the songs—
mostly note-for-note renderings of the
well-known recordings—keep on com-
ing, Ike comes off more as a comic
buffoon than as a real menace. I don’t
think this is due to any odd intent on
behalf of the show’s producers but,
rather, to the distorting imperatives of
mass entertainment—tell the story, but
keep it light.
Everybody knows, even before he
shows up, that Ike is the villain in the
Tina Turner story. On Broadway, under
what looks like a thousand lights, in
front of a crowd impatient to cheer,
this makes him a chintzy Big Bad
Wolf. Then, too, Watts, the poor actor
tasked with this role, has an irreme-
diably friendly face and funny aspect.
From afar, he looks and moves a bit
like Eddie Murphy, and, when I saw
the show, he sometimes, at the most
despicable moments, garnered what
seemed to be accidental laughs.
For the most part, the show is fun.
The songs sound good, and nobody’s
high opinion of Tina Turner will be
negatively affected. Very much to the
contrary, Warren’s performance, which
sometimes veers happily into an out-
right concert, is a two-and-a-half-hour-
long hosanna. But I couldn’t help hop-
ing that, in the long run, Turner will
be given her true due, her personal his-
tory plumbed for its deepest applica-
tions. This great theatrical rendering
of her life might come only when liv-
ing memory of Turner as an entertainer
has faded, and her bright intensity as
an archetype can shine through, un-
hindered by obligatory applause. The
mood will be classical. Nobody will
think to hope for a good time.
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