Tina—The Tina Turner Musical - Nov 7 Broadway opening

[edjames]

Proud Mary will keep on rolling into midtown this fall as Tina—The Tina Turner Musical makes its Broadway premiere. The show will begin performances October 12 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, with opening night set for November 7.

 

As previously announced, Tony nominee Adrienne Warren will take on the title role of the rock legend, having recently earned an Olivier Award nomination for her performance in the musical's world premiere in London's West End. Additional casting will be announced at a later date.

[thickornotatall]

Proud Mary will keep on rolling into midtown this fall as Tina—The Tina Turner Musical makes its Broadway premiere. The show will begin performances October 12 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, with opening night set for November 7.

 

As previously announced, Tony nominee Adrienne Warren will take on the title role of the rock legend, having recently earned an Olivier Award nomination for her performance in the musical's world premiere in London's West End. Additional casting will be announced at a later date.

I saw Tina! last fall at The Aldwych in London.. Adrienne Warren was Tina and did a great job. The story line was as usual..hokey and sort of correct. The Ike character was also good vocally. We paid 150 Pounds for great balcony seats..Be prepared to get the royal screw here in America.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

... And the jukebox musicals just keep coming.

[bostonman]

I think that "Tina - The Tina Turner Musical" is one awful mouthful of a title. Sounds actually like they couldn't decide to go with the standalone first name or a description of the show, so they just threw it all in. Meh.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

I think that "Tina - The Tina Turner Musical" is one awful mouthful of a title. Sounds actually like they couldn't decide to go with the standalone first name or a description of the show, so they just threw it all in. Meh.

 

In a perfect world, the musical Tina would feature the neglected adopted child of an abusive golden-age film star. It's The Secret Garden, soaked in gin and covered with a thick coating of Comet cleanser. Susan Stroman would love working the wire hanger angle.

 

'Bring Me The Axe' has a nice musical ring to it.

[edjames]

Yes, critics agree its another jukebox musical but one with an outstanding roster of hits and a lead performance by Adrienne Warren that shouldn't be missed. I'm seeing it Thanksgiving Eve....can't wait!

 

NYPost called it a "towering performance."

https://nypost.com/2019/11/07/tina-turner-musical-review-a-towering-broadway-performance/

‘Tina Turner Musical’ review: A towering Broadway performance

If you want to relive Tina Turner’s prime, you can’t get much better than Adrienne Warren. The star of “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” which opened Thursday night on Broadway, has that smoky-but-booming voice, the Jupiter-sized charisma and those high-energy dance moves. And she can rock a highlighted wig.

But there’s more to it than that. As John Lloyd Young and Jessie Mueller proved in their turns as Frankie Valli and Carole King, the best performances in jukebox musicals go beyond technically proficient impressions and shoot for something real. Warren’s galvanizing turn is, in every sense, in the same league as those Tony winners. The 79-year-old Turner has led a hard life, and Warren lets you know it.

That said, “Tina” is still a by-the-numbers biomusical.

It starts with the star’s childhood in rural Tennessee, when she was a young, spirited Anna Mae Bullock wailing gospel music in church. She grows up fast, meets Ike Turner at a St. Louis blues club, joins him on tour and helps create the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. That’s when things get dark.

An artist’s big break is usually the most joyous part of a jukebox musical. Not in this case.

As we now know, while the singer was belting out the enduring hits of the ’60s and ’70s — “Proud Mary” among them — she was being abused by her then-husband, Ike (Daniel J. Watts). He’d slap her around, cheat on her with his manager and subject her to all sorts of emotional torment. Watts manages to make the monstrous Ike seem human. Still, Act 1 is dominated by hardship.

Luckily, the mood lifts whenever Warren sings. The “River Deep, Mountain High” recording session, the show’s single best performance, gives us our first thrilling taste of her vocal fireworks. (The role’s demands have her performing just six times a week; Nkeki Obi-Melekwe sings both matinees.) As Tina soon learns, she doesn’t need Ike on a single, let alone in her life.

Act 2 finds the singer reinventing herself in London and exploring a more synthesized sound with the hit song “What’s Love Got To Do With It.” She also meets German producer Erwin Bach (Ross Lekites), the man who remains her husband to this day.

Katori Hall’s book gives into the usual biomusical formula: wink-wink jokes for fans, stereotypical record producers and more slammed doors than “Noises Off.” But there’s an uneasy scene near the end of the show, in her mother’s hospital room. Despite Tina’s success, all her mom wants is for her to get back together with Ike. It’s the production’s best nonmusical moment.

But let’s be real: You come to “Tina” for the songs. Director Phyllida Lloyd (“Mamma Mia!”) stages them smoothly, with vibrant pops of color that ripple off the shimmering fringe of Mark Thompson’s costumes. And all of them — including “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” “Private Dancer” and “We Don’t Need Another Hero” — sound glorious. During the exuberant final concert, Warren isn’t just rolling on the river: She’s stampeding through Broadway.

[edjames]

And, Jesse Green in the NYTimes writes;

 

Review: The ‘Tina’ Musical Is One Inch Deep, Mountain High

Tina Turner gets the bio-jukebox treatment, with all its lows (emaciated storytelling) and one of its peaks (a star-making performance from Adrienne Warren).

“What is a musical?”

I heard the perpetual question raised again a few days ago, and not innocently or idly. A showbiz veteran was concerned about the prospects for “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” which opened on Thursday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.

How would it be different from a rock concert? she wondered. Would a life story like Turner’s fit into the form? And why, she asked finally, “would anyone want to see that?”

These are great questions, which is not surprising because the person asking them was Tina Turner herself. Now happily retired, and turning 80 this month, she discussed her initial misgivings in an article she recently wrote for Rolling Stone about the making of the $16.5 million bio-jukebox musical that now bears her name. Apparently, she got over her doubts; is it unfriendly to say that, having seen the show, I’m still working on mine?

And make no mistake, I see Turner — the greatest rock queen ever to drag herself onto her own damn throne — as a friend, at least in the sense that millions of others do, as someone to admire and even protect. If hers has been the story of triumph rescued from the disaster of childhood neglect and horrendous spousal abuse, ours has been the good fortune to see that redemption rendered in real time as music and spectacle.

So Turner’s last question is the easiest to answer: I’d hazard that almost anyone who’d ever heard or seen her might want to experience her tale told onstage.

It’s a good tale, in theory, cut to the pattern of classic drama. Two elemental forces — hurricane-voiced Anna Mae Bullock and typhoon-tempered Ike Turner — are pitted in a struggle that nearly destroys both. But while Ike, for his sins, winds up a pariah and eventually dies of an overdose, Anna, rechristened Tina by her Svengali-like husband, rises from the depths, to greater glory solo than she ever achieved under his boot.

More important, as far as pure entertainment is concerned, this story comes with songs that can thrill an audience when rendered as Turner sang them; at this, the musical “Tina,” directed by Phyllida Lloyd, happily succeeds. In a performance that is part possession, part workout and part wig, Adrienne Warren rocks the rafters and dissolves your doubts about anyone daring to step into the diva’s high heels.

But as to Turner’s other questions, I’m afraid I share her initial skepticism.

To rip the Band-Aid off quickly, the book (by Katori Hall, withFrank Ketelaar and Kees Prins) is so thin it’s see-through. You can’t really blame Hall, whose earlier work (including “The Mountaintop” and “Our Lady of Kibeho”) is complex and layered. No, this is a problem built into the biographical jukebox genre, whose songs leave the narrative only enough time for turning points and climaxes. Cherry-picked lives look ludicrous.

Shuffling and reassembling events to smooth the arc may improve the shape, but at the cost of accuracy; the 1993 Turner biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It” was almost as much fiction as fact. This stage musical, for which Turner and her second husband, Erwin Bach, are credited as executive producers, is truer but blurrier. It rushes so hard that Warren, who appears in almost every scene, has to swap emotions even faster than costumes. She sometimes seems more rattled than ravaged.

The problem is exacerbated by another jukebox tic: songs bent into improbable shapes to serve a story they weren’t designed for. When Ike (Daniel J. Watts) proposes to Tina seemingly out of the blue, she responds by singing “You Better Be Good to Me,” from her 1984 comeback album. By 1984, she was divorced and had the guts to back up the lyric’s threat — but the scene is set in 1962, when she didn’t.

Such gaps in logic can be bridged if you spend enough time thinking about them; perhaps it’s meant as irony that Tina sings the joyous “

” — about a love that “gets stronger every day” — just after getting a black eye from Ike.

But having to do that kind of mental work yanks you out of thestory. So when the song “

” turns up to illustrate the moment when Tina, at her nadir, is working as a maid to make ends meet, I had to ignore the lyrics, about a prostitute who will “do what you want me to do,” and just enjoy Warren’s husky, pungent way with the tune. The same was true when “

,” the apocalyptic anthem from the “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” soundtrack, was conscripted for a cremation.

Is it a surprise that a show with 41 credited songwriters cannot sustain a coherent point of view on a main character who sings in 25 of the 27 numbers? Ike, with just a few musical and narrative gestures, is better articulated, and Watts is terrific delivering his gleaming menace.

But Lloyd, in much of her staging, does not serve the book scenes well. The pace is too hectic except when it unaccountably grinds to a halt, which is an odd problem in a show that was already running in London for more than a year before being remounted for Broadway. And perhaps it’s only to be expected from the director of “Mamma Mia!” — the show that jump-started the jukebox genre — that the tone is generally coarse and obvious.

Still, whenever you begin to despair of its story, “Tina” (and, with it, Lloyd’s sense of buoyancy) roars back in purely non-narrative ways. Suddenly, Bruno Poet’s lights bump way up. Mark Thompson’s costume designs provide the icons we want: the gold shimmy dress with tiers of fringe, the Alaia red leather mini zipped up the front. And Anthony van Laast’s choreography, perhaps too slick in the early scenes, when Tina and the (terrific) Ikettes would not have been so smooth, turns deliciously satisfying in the later ones, when the star owns her body at last.

But what I’ve just described is a rock concert — which is what “Tina” essentially turns into. It’s a blast if that’s what you came for. If you meant to see a true union of song and story, though, you won’t get it here. Because that, to answer Turner’s first question, would be a real musical.

[edjames]

Tina made a special appearance on opening night and gave an emotional speech:

 

https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Photo-Coverage-Adrienne-Warren-and-the-Cast-of-TINA-Take-Their-Opening-Night-Bows-20191108

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

While Warren gives a star-turn performance, there's something missing from this show. It feels empty.

 

I get that shows like this are what drive profit, but it really feels like just another thrown together jukebox musical. No heart.

 

[MEDIA=giphy]3o7TKDt2tKDR6WRCuI[/MEDIA]

[thickornotatall]

While Warren gives a star-turn performance, there's something missing from this show. It feels empty.

 

I get that shows like this are what drive profit, but it really feels like just another thrown together jukebox musical. No heart.

 

[MEDIA=giphy]3o7TKDt2tKDR6WRCuI[/MEDIA]

Welcome to Broadway..First They Pick Your Pocket...Then Lousy Seats....Finally a Half-assed musical....The men and women..boys and girls who sing..dance..act are not at fault..It's the Box Office GREED...

We saw 2 shows in London for about 1/2 the price of Broadway....

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Welcome to Broadway..First They Pick Your Pocket...Then Lousy Seats....Finally a Half-assed musical....The men and women..boys and girls who sing..dance..act are not at fault..It's the Box Office GREED...

We saw 2 shows in London for about 1/2 the price of Broadway....

 

To be more exact, it's the producers. Ticket prices are sky high because people cough up the money. The major problem with high prices is the audience entitlement that goes along with it. Feet on chairs, stage, using cellphones, talking, eating. Broadway has become people's living room and not for the betterment of the experience.

 

London: It also helps that total capitalization of shows in the West End is a lot less than on Broadway. Hot, newer shows like Harry Potter, Six and Hamilton are all still charging top prices... Equal to Broadway, more or less.

[+ WilliamM]

My first Broadway show was in 1959, a play with Barbara Bel Geddes and Henry Fonda.

 

I had absolutely no complaints about current Broadway or off Broadway adiences. The last two shows I saw were Little Shop of Horrors and The Great Society.

[Cajunmc]

Anyone know of good sources to get lower priced tickets to this show? Or other broadway shows?

[edjames]

This topic of discount tickets has been discussed before, but a quick recap:

 

TDF offers discounted "day-of-performance" tickets at their Times Sq TKTS location.

Most seats are half-priced.

You cannot select your seats.

If you are eligible for membership, tickets for some advanced performances are available on-line.

Membership is not free and there are requirements for membership (full-time student, retiree, etc)

TKTS Times Square

Located "under the red steps" in Father Duffy Square at Broadway and 47th Street

HOURS

For Evening Performances:Monday:3:00pm - 8:00pmTuesday:2:00pm - 8:00pmWednesday:3:00pm - 8:00pmThursday:3:00pm - 8:00pmFriday:3:00pm - 8:00pmSaturday:3:00pm - 8:00pmSunday:3:00pm - 7:00pm

For Matinee Performances:Wednesday:10:00am - 2:00pmThursday:10:00am - 2:00pmSaturday:10:00am - 2:00pmSunday:11:00am - 3:00pm

 

Otherwise, check out the Playbill.com website or the Broadway.com website for discount codes.

 

Finally, check out Goldstar.com for seats. Not all shows, but discounts available. You may have to join to participate.

 

Remember, not all Broadway shows have discounts.

[marylander1940]

[+ nycman]

Still a Goddess.....

 

Thank you for sharing.

[edjames]

A really good show filled with outstanding music.

A note-worthy performance by Adrienne.

Recommended.

[bostonman]

The performance at the Macy's parade was good, I'll admit - though it was also the only promo for a new show on the broadcast, which is a shame.

 

However, there's still nothing that makes me want to go see yet another "story of a singer's life with all their songs shoehorned in" jukebox show. Just...can't...do...it.

 

However, I did see the PBS broadcast of the London Kinky Boots this weekend, and was reminded that famous pop singer songwriters like Cyndi Lauper (and Sara Bareilles, of Waitress fame) can actually pen successful and wonderful original new scores specifically for the theatre. Give me more of those.

Edited December 3, 2019 by bostonman

[+ WilliamM]

The performance at the Macy's parade was good, I'll admit - though it was also the only promo for a new show on the broadcast, which is a shame.

 

However, there's still nothing that makes me want to go see yet another "story of a singer's life with all their songs shoehorned in" jukebox show. Just...can't...do...it.

 

However, I did see the PBS broadcast of the London Kinky Boots this weekend, and was reminded that famous pop singer songwriters like Cyndi Lauper (and Sara Bareilles, of Waitress fame) can actually pen successful and wonderful original new scores specifically for the theatre. Give me more of those.

 

As you well know, watching a show on television is hardly the same as seeing it in the theater.

[bostonman]

As you well know, watching a show on television is hardly the same as seeing it in the theater.

 

Yes, and I had posted that I liked what I heard on the TV excerpt of Tina. But I really have no interest in this type of show. It has nothing to do with what I saw on TV, it has to do with what I know about the actual form of the production.

 

As far as Kinky Boots goes, I have seen it in the theatre as well as the recent televised version, and loved it both ways.

[+ Cash4Trash]

Saw it this past Sunday. It's one of the better jukebox musicals and I enjoyed it.

[bostonman]

Saw it this past Sunday. It's one of the better jukebox musicals and I enjoyed it.

 

I'm glad to know people are enjoying it.