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Jukebox musicals are a tricky beast. 

How much do you lean into biography and recreation; delivering the show-stopping familiarity of the bops that made musical acts beloved enough to soundtrack a whole show as something of an extended tribute act? Or do you go a route more like We Will Rock You or Jagged Little Pill, letting the songs breathe on their own merits, and find a story that fits their narrative?

Tina: The Tina Turner Musical falls firmly in the first camp. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Katori Hall, Frank Ketelaar, and Kees Prins, Turner and her husband Erwin Bach served as executive producers on the story. 

In keeping with Turner’s autobiography I, Tina: My Life Story, and the Angela Bassett-staring biographical film What’s Love Got to Do with It, the musical version of Tina traces Turner’s life story from her beginnings in Nutbush, Tennessee all the way through to her record-breaking Rio de Janeiro concert in 1988. 

With such well-known source material, Tina largely lives or dies based on who plays the eponymous role. That’s reinforced by the show itself, which takes a much more black-box approach than many big productions: relying on props, a video background, and costumes to convey time periods rather than big sets (save for the final show-stopper.)  

Fortunately, Jayna Elise absolutely delivered on the first night of Broadway Across Canada’s run of the show at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. 

Elise appeared on America’s Got Talent as a precocious pre-teen, and more recently made it to the finals of American Idol last year. (Who knew American Idol was still trucking?) Her vocals are genuinely astounding—resonant high notes, a more gravelly lower range, capable of channeling the kind of wildfire that made Turner famous in the first place. Paired with a dedication to matching Turner’s physicality beyond just her trademark shoulder-shimmies, Elise is the beating heart of the show.

That might actually have been to the show’s detriment at its Vancouver premiere. A few too many audience members got into the moment, and decided to yell things like “You go, girl!” during dramatic moments of the performance—which, while cathartic, isn’t exactly the vibe.

The two halves of Tina have very different emotional beats. 

For all Tina is marketed as an “uplifting comeback story,” the first half of the show is pretty dark. It deals with familial neglect, spousal abuse, suicide ideation, drug addiction, racism—the kind of real-world grit that’s often left out of a shiny musical—largely told through vignettes that are chronologicaly but not necessarily consecutive. A few later cuts from Turner’s catalogue also sneak into the first half, perhaps to keep all the bangers from being at the end.

In contrast, the second half—with its sweeping musical numbers and too-good-to-be-true coincidences—is more easygoing fare. That makes an off-hand racist comment hit all the harder when it does happen. 

The overall effect, therefore, is oddly melodramatic: a true-enough retelling of Turner’s troubled rise to fame, a rather brief gloss over the period immediately following her divorce from Ike, and then an exploration of who believed in her enough to catapult her to her successful rock ’n’ roll career. 

With a finale that cranks the speakers and got the audience dancing (and maybe burst an eardrum or two), Tina reminds us that Turner was an icon for a reason. She was simply the best.