A Night with Janis Joplin review and star rating: ★★★★
“They said the bad thing about women is that they don’t think before they speak – but that’s the best thing,” says Mary Bridget Davies as Janis Joplin in this musical celebration of the rock ‘n’ roll singer, who died from a heroin dose in 1970 aged 27.
A Night with Janis Joplin offers a whole picture of the woman, especially her compelling vulnerability, distracting from the tunes to offer ruminations on life that feel straight from the horse’s mouth. Tony Award nominee Mary Bridget Davies’ vocals burn with the same self-questioning sense of ennui Joplin experienced; she is a spectacular vocalist, more than once eliciting standing ovations midway through acts.
We learn the audience are more important than gigs and music is more important than boys as she battles through Cry Baby, Me and Bobby McGee, Piece of My Heart, Mercedes Benz, Cry Baby and Summertime, with Bridget Davis often mimicking the exquisite gravelly vocal that became Joplin’s trademark.
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Randy Johnson, who wrote and directed this London premiere as well as its first outing in 2011 in the US, presents A Night with Janis Joplin like a live gig with the artist. It’s unusual not to make a life story into a fully-fleshed musical like the Bob Marley or Tina Turner biopics, but presenting Joplin as if she were performing brings an interesting rawness; her self-questioning feels incredibly urgent, almost unnervingly close to the actual woman and her story, though perhaps the format wouldn’t work if not in the excessively capable hands of Bridget Davis.
A self-proclaimed “white chick singing the blues,” Johnson wisely introduces Nina Simone, Etta James and Aretha Franklin, paying homage to the Black singers that inspired Joplin. The story of how these women threaded into Joplin’s life is a little threadbare, the ladies sort of appearing one after the other in a role call, though Bridget Davies brings you so much on Joplin’s side that you don’t mind too much.
Yet, A Night with Janis Joplin is best when it feels like a proper gig. When Bridget Davis belts, or tells heartbreaking stories about how she hopes to live to an old age. You hang on her words; particularly in the second act when there’s less commercial imperative to bang out the tunes and more focus on melancholia, and a questioning of how the blues as a music genre intersects with sadness and depression.
It’s too loud. Signs on the doors warn the show is “very loud,” which presumably is a way of turning the ferocity and making the show feel like it might have in the late-60s during Joplin’s brief era of stardom. But authenticity shouldn’t be confused with good ear health. Otherwise, this is a commendably raw ode to a legend.
A Night with Janis Joplin plays at the Peacock Theatre until 28 September