‘Transformative’: The musical that freed Tina Turner from her past

Nutbush still blows Katori Hall’s mind. In a YouTube video from 2022, we join the playwright from Memphis as she takes the short drive northeast, via Tina Turner Highway, to soak up the tiny rural town where the former Anna Mae Bullock was raised by her grandmother back in the 1940s and ’50s.

What she finds is, “um, nothing… nothingness going as far as the eye can see,” she says as she surveys the empty crossroads, peeling weatherboards and the still flourishing cotton fields where the future superstar worked as a girl. But it’s more affirmation than disappointment.

“This one little rose was able to grow out of the concrete of this really small, oppressive town and change the universe,” Hall declares in the video. It’s effectively the story arc of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, the gritty/ glittering jukebox spectacular that opens in Melbourne this month with Ruva Ngwenya in the lead.

Ruva Ngwenya and the Ikettes in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.Credit: Daniel Boud

“There was a great desire from Tina to have someone who was a bit closer to her own experience,” Hall says today, reflecting on landing the coveted job of writing the book for the musical, which has so far conquered 25 cities worldwide. “There was an interest to bring in a writer who could add a bit more cultural specificity and regional knowledge.

“I always say that I was meant to write this because my mother was such a big fan of Tina that my eldest sister is named after her. Tina has been the soundtrack of my life from a very early age, so it feels like kismet to have laid my hands on the book. It was one of those majestic blessings that occur not too often in an artist’s life.”

The blessed chalice was laced not just with smash hits, but poison too. The horrors of Tina Turner’s first act are well known: abandoned by her mother, surviving bandleader-husband Ike Turner’s ritual violence only to suffer the indifference of a racist, sexist and ageist industry. In her triumphant second act of the ’80s and beyond, she often cited a tenet of her Buddhist faith: “Turn the poison into medicine.”

That balance was off, by the singer’s own estimation, in the brutal 1993 biopic What’s Love Got To Do with It, starring Angela Bassett as Turner. When Hall was summoned to a meeting at Turner’s Zurich home early in the creation of this “new version” of her life story, “she was very clear that she did not want to be defined by her abuse,” the writer says.

Ike and Tina Turner, circa 1972.Credit: Getty Images

“I think any woman who has gone through such a tragedy in their life would feel that. You don’t want your baddest day to be the day that you are defined by. I was really adamant to not shy away and be honest about it, but also to show how you can forge forward, how you can make a new life for yourself.”

Despite Turner’s misgivings, that was the message Hall had received when she saw the film as a 12-year-old girl. “I do think ... there was this fierce transparency that came about from her sharing her life with people in cinematic form, and so her struggles really became embedded in black American culture,” she says.

“For me, there was strength in knowing that she was such a survivor and that she had pushed through and slayed all of these dragons, whether it was the dragon of domestic abuse, or ageism… Just to see a woman having gone through so much … and using those wounds as a way forward for other people by sharing everything that she went through.

“So yes, I placed her on a pedestal pretty early. She quickly became not just an entertainer in my home, but an important figure when it came to women’s rights.”

That said, one of the more disarming scenes in Hall’s story imparts an unexpected jolt of sympathy for Ike Turner: a soliloquy that draws a longer bow of generational damage that so often underpins acts of violence. The fact that the scene survived Turner’s “lotta, lotta, lotta notes” is testament to her character as much as the writer’s depth of intention.

“I’m not interested in monsters,” Hall says. “I’m very interested in human beings that do monstrous things. I talked to Tina a lot about allowing for some sort of social, cultural and psychological context… for there to be a kind of understanding — not an excuse, but an understanding — as to why a man would do that to a woman, to another human being.

Tina Turner in 1964. “There was strength in knowing that she was such a survivor and that she had pushed through and slayed all of these dragons,” says Katori Hall.Credit: Getty Images

“Being a Southerner, having heard the many horrible stories about how both men and women have been denigrated and have had to live with the weight of racism in their lives and in their hearts, I wanted to use my imagination as well as her true story.”

It’s hard to overstate the significance of Hall’s Southern upbringing to the artist she has become. The immense historic and cultural weight of Memphis looms large in all of her work, from her 2009 breakthrough, The Mountaintop, which imagines Martin Luther King’s meeting with an angel in a seedy hotel room on the eve of his assassination, to the kitchen drama that earned her a Pulitzer Prize in 2021, The Hot Wing King.

“Tina has been the soundtrack of my life,” Hall says.Credit: The New York Times

As we speak today, she’s preparing to direct the third season of P-Valley, her hit TV drama revolving around a strip club in the fictional Mississippi river town of Chucalissa. Casual viewers may not recognise the name borrowed from a prehistoric site within modern Memphis, but the volatile social dynamics, dazzling language and loud and proud hip-hop soundtrack are clear signposts back home.

“My parents were huge music lovers. Hung out in blues clubs, hung out with the stars: Rufus Thomas, Isaac Hayes ... It was just all around you, growing up in the ’80s, going into the ’90s,” she says. “To see the music scene shift from blues and R&B to rap music, crunk music, trap music [both subgenres of Southern hip-hop] … Working on P-Valley, we are always drawing on the musical impact of Memphis to continue telling that story in contemporary times.

“Memphis is such an emblem of black excellence and black progress, but oftentimes black pain, because of the struggles the city went through in the wake of so much change and strife ... As an artist from this beautiful city/country town, I always want to be that mirror. I think of how [playwright] August Wilson was a mirror for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I’ve tried to be that kind of reflection for Memphis, Tennessee.”

Hall left Memphis as her high school’s first black valedictorian in 1999, but in her earliest interviews she was upfront about the resistance she encountered as a fledgling American playwright of colour. Unable to find a US theatre willing to stage The Mountaintop, her breakthrough came not at home but in London: the same city Tina Turner had fled to for reinvention in the early 1980s.

“I do think it’s interesting that as two black women at completely different points in history, we decided to step away from our own cultural home to redefine or truly define ourselves as artists.

“I do find that as an African American, particularly as a black woman, it is hard to break through in whatever medium that you’re working in, whether it’s music, film; hell, whether you want to be a doctor, or whether you want to be the first female president!”

Asked whether the America she knows will be ready for the latter come November, she answers without hesitation. “No, it’s not, and that’s why it has to happen.”

Elarica Johnson and Brandee Evans in P-Valley.

Given the demands of P-Valley and other projects — a screen adaptation of her play Hurt Village is also in development — Hall admits she’s not kept up with the phenomenal global expansion of The Tina Turner Musical (300,000 tickets sold in Sydney alone). But she treasures the memory of its first night on Broadway in 2019 with her childhood hero beaming at her side.

“On opening night, she was just so thankful. I remember seeing her just so overjoyed with the journey. I loved how much she laughed during [the show], because she was a woman who lived big; her heart was big, and she laughed loud.

“It was like she had accepted everything as a fully healed individual, seen all of the ups and downs, the mountaintops and the valleys in her life, and that really touched me and changed me as a woman, knowing that life is complicated, and you will be broken sometimes, but … to see her just take herself in with clear eyes, that was one of the most transformative moments of my life.”

Tina: The Tina Turner Musical previews from September 21 and opens October 3 at the Princess Theatre. http://tinathemusical.com.au