New Janis Joplin Musical Headed Towards Broadway this Fall

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "A Few Figs from Thistles", 1920
US poet (1892 - 1950)  

Well, looks like Janis will be recreated on Broadway this Fall...

Janis Joplin Musical Coming to Broadway This Fall

By PATRICK HEALY

Jim Cox  presents Mary Bridget Davies in “Janis Joplin.”

 

“A Night With Janis Joplin,” a concert-as-theater featuring a buzz-generating performance by Mary Bridget Davies as Joplin, will open on Broadway this fall after touring the country over the last two years. The producers Todd Gershwin (a great-nephew of George and Ira Gershwin) and Daniel Chilewich, in association with Joplin’s estate, announced the Broadway plans on Wednesday, with performances beginning Sept. 20 at the Lyceum Theater and an opening night of Oct. 10.

Ms. Davies, a blues singer from Cleveland who will be making her Broadway debut, has earned strong reviews during the show’s runs in Portland, Washington, D.C., Pasadena, and elsewhere for her vocal performances of Joplin hits like “Piece of My Heart,” “Ball and Chain,” and “Me and Bobby McGee.” The show, which largely takes the form of an imagined Joplin concert, is written and directed by Randy Johnson. Additional casting will be announced later; according to reviews during the tour, the show also features an actress playing several famous singers who were inspirations to Joplin, like Bessie Smith and Aretha Franklin.
Asked for the total cost of the Broadway production, a spokesman for the show said, “The producers have declined to comment on the capitalization but we can say it has been budgeted for a house that is traditionally a home for plays.” That amount is typically in the mid-seven figures.

Ah yes, Janet, the hot mama of Haight Ashbury and the Queen of Hard Edged Rhythm and Blues...who rose to fame so meteorically and then self-destructed almost as fast...

I guess most people familiar with Rock and Roll history know all the basics about Janis...how she grew up in Port Arthur Texas and found her teen years a nightmare of rejection and taunts of "pizza face" from bullying local types... ( much later in San Francisco she got a dermatologist who knew something to treat her but the damage was already done, like it is for so many sensitive kids with bad acne and who are dangerously "different" to the culture of that high school...

I loved her first album--"Cheap Thrills"-- butI kept missing Janis in concert, even the time she played at the Fillmore East where I was going to NYU Grad Film School just around the corner  --and again later when she did her last concert appearance (now the "Pearl" style Janis) up at Hunter College...

It never occurred to me that her time would run out so fast...

I liked the movie they did about her in -what was it, 1975-- with its horrific sequence of Janis and some hippie friends visiting something like a high school reunion in Port Arthur...which was of course just a repeat of earlier awful experiences.

Moral I took from it: If you leave someplace like Port Arthur for San Francisco, and become a star there-- for heaven's sake, don't be a masochist and go back for more of the same in Port Arthur, stay in S.F. where you belong!

Other friends of mine knew her whole story much better than I did... I learned a lot about her only after she was gone...

What a talent, whether knocking out "Summertime" or "Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz"--or doing a complete switcheroo and doing a sweet voiced country version of "Me and Bobby McGee."

To go out with something of a laugh (hard to do, but I think Janis would have liked it)--her famous statement to Leonard Cohen, "Ordinarily, I only sleep with good looking guys but in your case I'll make an exception."