Love, Janis is an affecting look at the last four years in the brief life of singer Janis Joplin. It is also one hell of a rock 'n' roll show. The musical is installed in the Royal George Theater for what should be a long, healthy run, as it should attract the younger generation in droves. The show will likely please a contemporary rock audience as well as the generation that grew up in the psychedelic 1960s, a decade that Joplin helped shape musically.
Love, Janis is a meld of Joplin letters to her family after she left home in 1966, interviews, and 19 of her songs. It's a two-actor concept, one playing the public, singing Janis and the other the private, letter-writing Janis. The public Janis is such a demanding role that it is split between Andra C. Mitrovich and Cathy Richardson. The only other live performers are the first-rate musicians who back the singer. The show picks up Janis as she leaves her home in Port Arthur, Texas in 1966 at the age of 23. She heads for San Francisco to try to crack the vibrant San Francisco rock music scene.
Through Janis' letters, the show traces her rise as the featured singer for Big Brother and the Holding Company to her success as the leader of her own bands. It was an astonishing career compressed into four years. Joplin made only three albums before her death from a drug overdose in 1970. Add an album released after her death, and it is still a minimal recorded legacy for a performer who ranks among the greatest blues shouters, black or white, in American music history.
Joplin's letters were not particularly profound, but they were sincere, deeply felt and sometimes eloquent. They showed an emotionally vulnerable young women longing for family love and acceptance, but also an individual determined to make her own way in a very rough business. In the end, she self-destructed through booze, drugs and the pressure of stardom. But she lived long enough to become one of the icons of rock music. The actress who plays the private Janis as a slightly spaced-out woman who only wanted to sing her way evokes an individual who couldn't handle her vices but didn't have a phony bone in her body. The recitation of Joplin's family letters is filled with emotion and despair; one can see why Joplin was destined not to live to middle age.
The physical production relies mostly on multiple changes of costume, plus slide projections, both realistic and psychedelic, flashed on screens above the stage. The band stands at the rear of the stage. It's a simple but effective staging that allows the words and music to speak for themselves. Ron Keaton, one of Chicago's top performers, does a commendable job as the offstage voice. We haven't lacked for shows based on the lives, usually short and tragic, of rock stars. Love, Janis is a cut above most because it treats its subject with respect, minus any romanticizing or sentimentality.
