Awkward Tina Turner musical makes you uncomfortable but still charms and thrills, like the star herself
Tina: The Tina Turner Musical at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre is ambitious storytelling with a real edge; it hovers uncomfortably between a stark meditation on domestic violence in a black American context, and a redemptive feel-good story of the triumph of talent.
The show opens with megastar Tina in her prime, about to go on stage at a monster concert. It then flashes back to her as a little girl in Nutbush, Tennessee, singing in church. Her mother, beaten by her father, flees the family home with Tina's sister, leaving Tina behind – a deep wound that haunts her life. Tina's own marriage to Ike Turner replicates this domestic violence scenario, in an intergenerational recycling of trauma. The script does not excuse Ike's violence, but does try to contextualise it among the major humiliations heaped on black male Americans in a deeply racist 1960s society.
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