A Night with Janis Joplin: The Musical, Peacock Theatre review - belting Blues singing in an oddly sanitised format

The signs in the Peacock’s foyer warn that this show features "very loud music”. Exactly what Janis Joplin fans want to hear. This is an evening for them, more a concert than a piece of musical theatre.

As a gig-musical, it is a five-star belter, with more talent onstage than is decent. Not just the singer who plays Janis, Mary Bridget Davies (Sharon Sexton will cover at some performances) but a trio of backing singers, dubbed the Joplinaires, who are the spit of singers from the glory days of this tribe in every move, sway and sashay. They are also called upon to pay tribute to the musical mentors Janis evokes – Etta James, Odetta, Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin (played by Kalisha Amaris, pictured below right). And they can belt it out as gorgeously as Davies does. Aiding them is a seriously hot, tight set of musicians, led by keyboard player Iestyn Griffiths, with not just one but two virtuoso guitarists, and a brass section and drummer to die for. 

As a piece of dramaturgy, though, this is an evening, much like MJ the Musical, where you keep waiting for the elephant in the room to turn up, and, aside from a bourbon bottle Janis takes occasional swigs from and a brief reference to drugs, it never does. The poignancy of her story, this “middle class white chick” from Port Arthur, Texas who didn’t “dig” her life, freighted with a talent she couldn’t suppress yet unable to make it work for her once she stepped offstage, is kept at bay. Writer-director Randy Johnson has created a piece that’s here to celebrate the artist not bemoan her tragic fate. 

Many of the rules of this kind of bio-gig-jukebox musical are reversed: Janis arrives fully formed, looking just as we remember her, Medusa hair whooshing round her head, panne-velvet flares already a wardrobe staple, hippie beads and gewgaws covering her chest. We don’t even see Wannabe Janis, who showed up to gigs in jeans and Ts, or the Janis who wowed the Monterey festival in a trouser suit and kitten heels. It’s only in the very last section of the show that we see photos of the gawky girl in 1950s dresses she used to be, accompanied by her musicals-loving mother and book-reading father, who made all his children get a library card as soon as they could read. It’s such an immense transformation that relegating it to a slideshow at the end seems odd.

One biographical fact that does get established early on is what an accomplished painter Joplin was. She did a series of jobs –  toyshop window dresser, coffee-shop waitress – siphoning off her pay to buy artists’ materials. The results are projected on a big screen at the back of the set. But the performing bug seems to have bitten long before this, when her mother brought home her latest cast recording of a Broadway show and the children would sing along, Janis apparently taking every part but the leads.

What the piece attempts instead of a conventional chronological narrative arc is recreating performances where Janis connected with music that moved her, usually the Blues. One of her earliest obsessions was the late-1950s Black doo-wop girl-group the Chantels – whom we see as three silhouettes on the screen on the back wall (there were four or five in the original lineup). She would go on to cover their single “Maybe” and perform it on US television.  

The parade of Blues icons continues throughout. They aren’t random choices, obviously, but are cued on randomly by Janis's reflections on her past. Dramatically it’s a format that comes to seem mechanical. We see Etta James (Georgia Bradshaw), who appears in a classic powder puff skirt on a raised dias, to a crazed hoe-down with Aretha Franklin (Kalisha Amaris), where the Queen of Soul picks up her skirts and positively struts and capers. Alongside a powerful contralto Odetta (Danielle Steers, who also comes on as Nina Simone and Bessie Smith, pictured below) there is also a generic Black Blues Singer (Choolwe Laina Muntanga), whose rich, soaring voice embodies both the strengths and fatal vulnerability of the everyday woman.

Joplin was undoubtedly among their number, but her sadness often takes a back seat here to her pure entertainment value, the sheer heft of her voice and the force of her stage persona. When she addresses the audience with her thoughts, they are sane and sage, unlike the girlish giggling hippie with a feather boa in her hair that she became in media appearances. One quote sticks, though, when she cannily announces that people like their Blues singers a) to be miserable and b) to die young. She claims she intended to be neither.

It’s when Davies unleashes her phenomenal voice that the show really lives up to expectations. She has that same ability to modulate a note with an all-out scream, seen to perfection in her overwhelming delivery of “Ball and Chain”. She can do lovely pianissimos, too, that are just as effective as her rage-filled lines. The great hits keep on coming: “Cry Baby”. "Stay With Me”, “Piece of My Heart”. And she has played Joplin onstage now for so long that she has ingested all the singer’s trademark mannerisms – the odd running-on-the-spot move, the bending sideways so low you fear she will topple over – and made them her own.

Those who want a true gig experience will have to forget the theatrical context and supply it themselves: audience participation is a must for things to go with a real swing. (At the end, don’t rush off before you are invited to sing along to “Mercedes Benz”). As a concert, it’s top-notch; as a theatrical piece about its subject, it could do with a stronger structure and a less forgiving spotlight. 

• A Night with Janis Joplin at the Peacock Theatre until 28 September
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