“WE ALWAYS DO IT NICE AND ROUGH” (A lyric from “Proud Mary”) Tina Turner in concert well after her divorce.
“HEY, HEY, LBJ/HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY?” (A 1960s protest chant.) President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Office during the Vietnam War.
TWO FALL OPENINGS ON Broadway are productions about gifted people who made it big, then ran into seemingly insurmountable problems. Hard work, determination and talent can solve everything (right?), yet only one of these protagonists ends up on top. Is Broadway teaching us conflicting life lessons?. Or maybe the real moral is: If you think show biz is cutthroat, wait till you try politics.
SMALL-TOWN GIRL, BATTERED WIFE, COMEBACK QUEEN
Is this woman’s enormous talent enough to save her?
TINA: THE TINA TURNER MUSICAL Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 West 46th Street, tinaonubroadway.com. 2 hours 40 minutes. Opened on Nov. 7. Open run.
Adrienne Warren, who starred as Tina Turner in the London version of “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” is now starring in the Broadway production. According to Jesse Green’s review in The New York Times, she “rocks the rafters'“ in a “star-making performance.” This is Warren’s third time on Broadway, after “Shuffle Along” (2016), for which she earned a Tony nomination, and “Bring It On: The Musical” (2014).
Set and costume design are by Mark Thompson.
THE EARLY DAYS Tina (née Anna Mae Bullock) was discovered in St. Louis, where she had moved to live with her mother and her sister. Daniel J. Watts, who plays Ike Turner, is on guitar in the photo. They married in 1962 and divorced in 1978.
One of the musical’s most powerful scenes: Tina, finally fed up with being physically abused by her husband, walks out on Ike and turns up at a motel’s check-in desk. With less than a dollar in her pockets, she basically asks the people there to give her sanctuary. (A similar scene appeared in the film “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” starring Angela Bassett.).
Choreography is by Anthony Van Laast.
SHE’S BAAAAAACK In this scene, Tina records her 1980s comeback album with the guidance of Phil Spector (Steven Booth). Spector was later accused of murder and has been in prison since the early 2000s, but that’s another story.
The show’s two dozen musical numbers include “Better Be Good to Me,,” “Shake a Tail Feather,” “Let’s Stay Together,” “Private Dancer,” “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” and of course “Proud Mary.”
And then there are lesser-known numbers, like “Nutbush City Limits.” It refers to Turner’s hometown, Nutbush, Tenn., an unincorporated community of fewer than 300 people, about 60 miles northeast of Memphis.
THE GERMAN MAN One thing that the film left out — and the musical includes — is Tina Turner’s relationship with and ultimate marriage to Erwin Bach (Ross Lekites), a German music executive. The couple now live in Switzerland, near Zurich.
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WELCOME TO THE ‘60s. Brian Cox as LBJ in “The Great Society,” which covers four years of Johnson’s truncated presidency.
BRILLIANT LEGISLATOR, ARM TWISTER, MAN OF CONSCIENCE
What could possibly bring down such a master politician?
“The Great Society,” Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, 160 West 65th Street, greatsocietybroadway.com. 2 hours 45 minutes. Opened on Oct. 1. Limited run. (Closed on Nov. 30.).
THREE AMIGOS. From left, Cox, Richard Thomas as Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Gordon Clapp as the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover.
“THE GREAT SOCIETY” is the farthest thing from a one-man show that you can find in a Broadway drama these days. A cast of 19 actors play more than three dozen characters, most of them historical figures, from William Westmoreland (Brian Dykstra) to Everett Dirksen (Frank Wood), from Pat Nixon (Angela Pierce) to Stokely Carmichael (Marchant Davis, who, by the way, speaks the words “black power” with an awe-inspiring combination of softness and passion).
A HARD RAIN’S GONNA FALL But of course the main man is Brian Cox, the British actor best known now as the star of HBO’s series “Succession.” Cox, left, is with Bryce Pynkham, who plays Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general Johnson inherited from John F. Kennedy — and his nemesis.
WE SHALL OVERCOME Grantham Coleman, center, plays the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and “The Great Society” includes a depiction of the Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama. In one scene, King explains a sad truth to Johnson: “The people in Chicago don’t want integration any more than Selma does.”
MARC KUDISCH, SITTING on desk, with Cox behind it. Kudisch, a three-time Tony Award nominee, plays three characters, including Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago.
LADY BIRD JOHNSON (Barbara Garrick) has a heart-to-heart with her husband. In the end, Johnson chooses not to run for re-election and makes a televised speech to announce his decision. The consensus is that the escalation of the Vietnam War did him in, but U.S. News & World Report once wrote that his brilliance as a legislator and deal maker simply didn’t transfer to the presidency.
“He was a nuts-and-bolts politician and a Washington insider,” the magazine wrote, but he “lacked the communication skills or charisma to give the country a wider sense of vision.”
In one of the last scenes, Richard Nixon (David Garrison), who was elected in 1968 with “a secret plan to end the war,” is trying out his new chair in the Oval Office. Johnson died four years after leaving the presidency..
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