What. Have. We. Terrible. Much. Too. Learning. If there is 1 thing the musical Tina makes clear, it is that. Especially at the stormy premiere, Sunday 9 February, a few hours before storm Ciara blew the last bubbles from the Utrecht champagne glasses. An almost completely white auditorium, in Black Tie, that is, with only a few people of colour, and behind me a couple of yucky white guys who were presumably from a sponsor, and therefore sat for two hours babbling through everything. How deeply rooted sexism, racism and superior thinking still is in our society. And how good Tina, the Musical About Tina Turner, is. And necessary.
We've already had a musical about Abba, which was great fun, and the ever-shrinking line-up of Pink Floyd's The Wall is also said to be hilarious, but none of that has anything to do with the power emanating from Tina, the musical. And I'll be honest with you: I wasn't expecting that. Sure, the power pop with which Tina Turner revived her career in the late 1970s after her successful but inky black years as the female half of the duo Ike &Tina Turner, always sounds good. Though for me, child of the 1960s, it was a bit slick, all of it. Since the premiere of that musical, I think a little differently [ref]Special mention for Han Kooreneef's translation of the lyrics. He managed to make Tina Turner's pop songs sound as if they were written in Dutch, by a top-class lyricist. That alone is reason enough to go and watch and listen[/ref].
Tangible story
To start with the latter: the thing, which was first trialled in Germany, is fantastically written. Chapeau to the team: Katori Hall, Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins. They managed to make a tangible story of the life of the greatest female pop star of at least the last century. I did not expect that Dutch authors could also write so flawlessly on emotion as the American-educated Hall.
The part before the interval can still be put away as a modern version of a tear-jerking masterpiece like Porgy and Bess, full of poor people, angry men and submissive women, you already know that after the interval the big payoff is going to follow. We experience how Tina Turner, then called Anne Mae Bullock, grows up in a dysfunctional vicar's family, is discovered by a dysfunctional black musician (Ike Turner), and ends up in a dysfunctional marriage of convenience with him, after which she loses herself in highly functional booze and drugs.
Sadder, wiser
How they feel next, sadder, wiser and forty, fighting back into the spotlight of pop culture, is another story of a struggle against sexism, racism, and age discrimination. And Heaven Seventeen. Nobody believed that a forty-something woman with a career that was mostly behind her could still mean anything.
The script of Tina, the Musical, is entirely focused on that 'coming of ripe old age', and that is not only a heartening reminder for every woman, young or mature, but also a reminder for every man: how we have abused our power, all these years.
Experienced
Ironic, of course, that pretty much the entire team of creatives in this musical is made up of men. Why it gave me hope is the cast. Or rather, mainly, the lead role. Nyassa Alberta. She may not have smoked, drunk and snorted enough yet to fully match the lived-in Tina Turner, but what a throat. She had me - and the nattering sponsor boys behind me through it all - flat. After that, it only got better.
Of course, I know that just about every musical is written to make you whimper in your seat. Combine that with pop songs that are also already targeting the heart with chemical precision, and you know that halfway through you need to have your tear fluids drip-filled. Fascinating to witness, and especially to see how fantastically it works. That there is even a fun kind of intertextual meta-experience when the link to David Bowie (Tonight) is made via the heavenly voice of a little girl to the musical Lazarus, where Life On Mars is also sung by a child, is then fun for the few who know both musicals. With such things, it does make it all almost art.
White Noise
Remains that I am amazed at how white-famous the Netherlands still is. There we all sit in the Beatrix Theatre in our dress code. With our white wine. To watch a black woman work her way towards her liberation in a dominantly white music culture. Liberation from racist prejudice, from the idea that women can only mean something under 40, and especially from the idea that men always determine women's success. Black Tie, White Noise. Bowie once wrote a song about that, about seven years after he recorded a duet with Tina.
There we were, and Tina herself could not be there, as travelling with this storm would be too complicated. A storm, then again, named after a woman: Ciara. Good thing it wasn't called Ike.
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