Tag: Katori Hall

When Tina Turner, retired in Switzerland after many decades as one of the most powerful voices in American pop, soul, and R&B, first heard the idea of rendering her life story as a musical, she knew exactly how she felt about it. “No, I’m not interested. No. No. No.” As she wrote of the experience in Rolling Stone in 2019, “I didn’t feel like talking about that stuff from the past because it gave me bad dreams. I was just settling into retirement, a newlywed, content to be Mrs. Erwin Bach, and the last thing on my mind was working anywhere but in my garden.”

But after meeting with the producers proposing the show, her position softened. She thought about “all the people who tell me that my story gives them hope and is my legacy” and ultimately gave the project her blessing. “Then,” she wrote, “I sat back to watch director Phyllida Lloyd and writer Katori Hall do what they do best.”

Those two names alone must have reassured her. U.K.-based Lloyd already had a stellar track record as director of the stage and cinematic versions of Mamma Mia!, which, in using the songs of ABBA, reaffirmed just how successful the “jukebox musical” genre could be. She’d also proven her skills with more serious material like The Threepenny Opera, La Bohème, an operatic version of The Handmaid’s Tale, and the Tony Award-nominated Mary Stuart.

At the time, native Memphian Katori Hall was less of a known quantity but had made waves with a play she’d begun while studying at The Juilliard School, The Mountaintop, which reimagined Martin Luther King Jr. on the night before his assassination. After opening in London and winning an Olivier Award in 2010, it went on to a successful Broadway run starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett. But for Tina Turner, perhaps Hall’s greatest qualification was that she was “a Tennessee girl, just like me.”

Taking over from early drafts by Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins, Hall crafted a compelling book for the show, titled Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, which opened in London in the spring of 2018 before moving to Broadway the next year. When that production was nominated for a dozen Tony Awards in 2020 and Adrienne Warren won in the category of best leading actress in a musical, Tina Turner’s instincts were vindicated. And when Hall won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for drama for a later play, The Hot Wing King, it reinforced the impression that, despite the reputation of jukebox musicals for superficiality, Tina was cut from a different cloth.

Now the show has hit the road, making its Memphis debut on Valentine’s Day at the Orpheum Theatre and slated to run there through February 19th. While there’s no denying the importance of the show’s success in London and New York, the current production in Memphis may be its most significant staging yet, in terms of its historical and cultural impact — because for both Hall and Turner, bringing the show to Memphis means bringing it all back home.

Nutbush City Limits

As anyone who’s seen the 1993 Oscar-nominated film, What’s Love Got to Do with It, knows, Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock in West Tennessee. Following Jackson Avenue some 50 miles to the northeast will bring you to the town of Nutbush, where a young Anna Mae grew up singing in the Spring Hill Baptist Church. Indeed, that may have been the most accurate thing about the film, which goes on to play fast and loose with the facts as it spins a fanciful version of Turner’s life. As Turner told Oprah Winfrey in 2018, “I watched a little bit of it, but I didn’t finish it because that was not how things went. Oprah, I didn’t realize they would change the details so much.”

As the musical was being created, Turner was determined to make it more true to life, and a crucial part of that was working with Hall. Even then, as Turner tells the Memphis Flyer via email, one shouldn’t assume that Memphis figured in her early life simply by virtue of its proximity.

“Memphis seemed another world away when I was growing up in Nutbush,” she writes. “Our town was so small and the access to the records coming out of Memphis was just from the radio. My life in Nutbush was very focused on my family and the church, and I suppose that was the music that I remember and how I started to sing. It wasn’t until I moved to St. Louis that I started to be more aware of the Memphis music through the local R&B scene.”

Nonetheless, Hall’s Memphis upbringing convinced Turner that she was working with someone who really understood her roots. “From the minute I met Katori I felt she was the right person to tell this story,” Turner says. “We talked so much about growing up in Tennessee and our families’ experiences. Katori understood immediately what it took for me to get to where I did, given where I started. The odds I had to overcome time and again.”

Hall feels the same way about their shared experience. “I grew up listening to Tina’s music because my mom was such an avid fan,” she says. “My eldest sister is named after her! So Tina’s influence and impact on my life has been ever-present. I do think, being a Southern gal myself, born of the Tennessee soil, really helped me step into her shoes a bit, in terms of thinking about everything she had gone through. Though we grew up through completely different times and different eras, the seeds of racism, planted so long ago, unfortunately bloom over and over again in that Tennessee soil. So both her lived experiences and mine inspired me to create this character of Tina that is in the show.”

We Don’t Need Another Hero

Hall is careful to point out that she took great pains to represent Turner’s character with as much nuance as possible. “The beautiful thing about Tina the person, or Anna Mae Bullock, is that she very much is still Anna Mae,” says Hall. “She has lived her life so bravely, and there’s a fierce transparency to her. I feel as though the character I’ve created based on her and her life is very much closely aligned with the actual Tina. And it’s because we had this icon who was so honest about everything she went through, whether it was her highs or her lows. We have really gone on this journey with her just because of how open she’s been about sharing her story with the world.”

In spite of Turner’s public openness, Hall felt she needed to engage with the star more directly, telling writer Julie Vadnal in 2019 that, in preparing to write the book, she did “several interviews over a few years. I’ve been working on [the musical] for almost five years. And of course, there’s her autobiography — I, Tina — and a movie out there. But for me, it was very important to talk to her again about all the things she had already told the world. Now she had some distance from it and was able to retell it and actually revise parts of our story that had gotten out of her hands.”

Part of that, Hall says, was decentering Turner’s abuse by ex-husband Ike. “Her story characterizes her as a survivor,” says Hall, “like this ultimate survivor, particularly of domestic abuse. And I don’t think people realize that she’s a survivor in other ways. She’s a survivor in terms of her family. She didn’t have the greatest relationship with her mother — in fact, there was quite a toxic relationship there. She was a survivor in terms of the entertainment industry. I think all these dragons combined created an opportunity to really show, yes, there’s a great amount of resilience there when it comes to domestic abuse, but there are other things she had to slay. Whole systems.”

Yet even that broader view of the obstacles Turner faced wasn’t enough, according to Hall. “Oftentimes we don’t allow people who are that powerful and that strong their vulnerability. For me, that was one of the greatest joys of this creative process. I was really allowed inside these complicated feelings she had toward her mother, toward Ike. I’m really grateful she allowed me that opportunity to weave that into her story and into the musical. I think a lot of people are going to be really touched by how cracked-open we get to see Tina be in the musical.”

Blow Your Horn, Raymond!

One especially egregious omission in the Hollywood version of Tina Turner’s life was her relationship with a member of Ike Turner’s band long before Ike claimed her hand in marriage. As profiled in the Flyer in 2021, saxophonist Raymond Hill first appears in the history of recorded music when the singer in Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, Jackie Brenston, shouts, “Blow your horn, Raymond! Blow!” on the breakthrough R&B hit, “Rocket 88.” Hill was with Ike’s band in St. Louis when young Anna Mae Bullock joined the group, and Hill and Bullock were involved long before Ike had any romantic inclinations toward his singer.

In the musical, Hill’s role in Tina Turner’s young life is at last being recognized; and that, Turner says, is deeply meaningful to her. “My relationship with Raymond was a very significant relationship in my life, especially because of our son, Craig. Raymond and I met when I was very young, and I had just started working with Ike when our romance began. Raymond had so many years of experience and I feel calling him an unsung hero of Black music is very true. I was very happy that the relationship has found its moment in the musical.”

For Hall, including Turner’s romance with Hill was crucial to the story. “When we talked,” Hall says of her interviews with Turner, “there was still this kind of girlish giddiness about Ray! So many years later! It became super apparent that I would need to not only include him, but also make him part of the narrative structure and drive of the show. Just because of how much he meant to her. As we all know, rock-and-roll is messy. Yet she was able to find love and have a child that she adored. She adored Craig, and it was so heartbreaking when he died in the past few years. So she’s just a woman who, even today, continues to experience so much tragedy.”

A Second-Hand Emotion

If What’s Love Got to Do with It cuts quickly to Tina Turner’s relationship and troubled marriage to Ike Turner, skipping Raymond Hill altogether, it also arguably oversimplifies Ike’s character. That was also something Hall was determined to correct as part of getting the Tina Turner story right.

“I knew that was going to be a huge task,” says Hall of complexifying what’s perhaps the most famous abusive marriage in history. “Ike’s pretty much the villain in her story. That’s just the truth. However, as we all know, people are people. People make mistakes. People are a balance of bad and good. I did not ever want to excuse Ike’s behavior, but I wanted people to understand. So I felt that giving the psychological, the social context of where he grew up and what made him who he was so important. That to me allowed for the nuance. There’s a scene where they try to get into a hotel and can’t because of the color of their skin. They have to sleep by the side of the road, and so you have this man who created rock-and-roll, and is an icon himself, still feeling like he’s invisible. I felt it was important to show that psychological complication so people could understand why any human being would displace their anger and try to control another person, especially when that other person is flying higher than you are, when you are just as deserving of recognition and credit. That’s something I really felt proud about. Because I don’t think we’ve gotten that in any story, whether it’s journalistic articles or previous tellings of her story. It felt like a necessity, especially knowing that this may be one of the last retellings of Tina’s life, particularly from a musical perspective.”

The actors who portray Tina Turner on alternate nights of the touring show, Zurin Villanueva and Naomi Rodgers, appreciate this nuance as well. “We have to respect every single character in this show,” notes Rodgers. “Katori did such an amazing job of giving Ike a moment of vulnerability in the show. Even though things didn’t change afterwards, there were still moments of vulnerability where you could remind yourself, ‘Wait, maybe this was the moment Tina forgave him for a quick second.’”

Villanueva agrees. “In scene work, you have to find the love. You can’t just hate someone. It’s not where the interest is. Because you stayed with someone for a reason. If there was no love, you’d walk out the door and that would be the end of the story. So it’s always about the duality, the love and the hate.”

“It Breaks You, Then It Builds You Up”

Such a duality shapes the entire musical, especially as it’s appearing on a Memphis stage. As Hall notes, part of relating to Tina’s roots in the Tennessee soil was recognizing the seeds of racism. The show opens here just as Memphis dominates international headlines for the trauma of police-sponsored terrorism, the latest instance in a long history of such trauma. The idea is not lost on the musical’s two lead actors.

“You can never forget watching your people, your community, in pain, especially a wound that’s been reopened multiple times,” says Villanueva. “It’s really difficult, but we are here to uplift and inspire and give strength as we continue to try and get results, and change our policies so this stuff doesn’t happen. We’re just there to give strength.”

Or, as Rodgers puts it, “It breaks you, then it builds you up, and it comforts you, and then it reminds you of who you are. Because that’s what we went through. And it hits! It shows the most important parts of [Tina Turner’s] life; it includes the hard parts and how you get through it. This is a story for such a time as this, especially for Memphis.”

Ultimately, for Hall, that’s both the irony and the power of having one’s own writing debut on the Memphis stage. “It’s a dream come true, as a hometown girl, to have your work grace a Memphis stage. I definitely feel like I’ve checked something off my bucket list. And I’m overjoyed that in this moment of Tina’s life, after she’s struggled for so much, we’re able to be in the room with her in this figurative way. I just hope that Memphians love and enjoy it just as much as we, as a creative team, have loved and enjoyed bringing her story to the world.”

Turner underscores how deeply having the show debut in Memphis has affected her. “So many forms of music have their roots in Memphis, and my life and career have circled the city so many times,” she writes. “To bring my show to Memphis has huge meaning to me. If you had told me all those years ago as a small child picking cotton in Nutbush that this would happen, I definitely wouldn’t have believed you, and thought you were telling me a fairy tale! It does feel almost like a full circle, to be returning home and to be able to tell my story in such an amazing way.”