'A Night with Janis Joplin' review – Mary Bridget Davies is astonishing as the legendary soul-stirring singer

Read our review of tribute musical A Night with Janis Joplin, now in performances at the Peacock Theatre to 28 September.

Mary Bridget Davies has been channelling Janis Joplin for the better part of 20 years, earning a 2014 Tony nomination for this very show in the process. So it should come as no surprise that she inhabits the iconic singer from the inside out, and makes an occasion of A Night with Janis Joplin for as long as she is holding centre stage.

The Texas singer-songwriter died in 1970, age 27, and leaves behind a bequest that would be impressive for someone far older but is doubly so when one considers the mark she made in such a tragically short time.

Few performers seemed to rip music from the gut the way Joplin famously did, her force field of feeling at apparent odds with her shy-seeming, bespectacled presence. That aspect to Joplin lives on in photos, quite a few of which function as pictorial backdrops to writer-director Randy Johnson’s much-travelled production, choreography by Patricia Wilcox.

The Joplin of legend summoned her material from somewhere deep within. To listen to “Me and Bobby McGee” or “Stay With Me” or “Cry Baby” or “Piece of my Heart” is to hear a performer who delivered up to the audience a piece of her soul: singing for her was synonymous with feeling, and one gleans that Joplin felt the world around her vividly and fully – arguably too deeply, which would account for her death from a heroin overdose before her second solo album had even been released.

Davies honours this back catalogue with a commitment to Joplin’s artistry, and her legacy, that is astonishing so behold. Small wonder Sharon Sexton is on hand to do “certain performances” (matinees mostly).

Davies’s empathy for the material borders on the feral. “We will sing our f---ing insides out,” this Joplin remarks from the stage, and Davies allows you to sense the mixture of defiance, despair and desire that fuelled the singer until the actual woman quite simply could take no more.

How frustrating, therefore, that the show doesn’t better illuminate the distance between the singer’s private pain and her full-throttle mode of public performance. I doubt I was alone in wondering what her sister and brother might have added by way of invaluable commentary; both siblings, now in their 70s, came onstage for the opening night curtain call.

Instead, since there has to be downtime afforded our star, Johnson’s solution is to bring on the various singers – all of them Black – whose own viscera-churning way with a song clicked with the young Joplin, who grew up, we’re told, listening to Broadway musicals on vinyl, not least Porgy and Bess. The blues were her lodestar – “a feeling, a mood, the devil itself.”

Mention of the musical-opera hybrid cues a rendition of “Summertime” from one of a hardworking supporting cast who are asked to impersonate Bessie Smith, Etta James, and the great Aretha, amongst others.

That last-named powerhouse (played here by Kamisha Alaris) is summarily described by Joplin as the best “next to me” – though I couldn’t immediately find evidence of the two having much to do with one another in real life, even if the show suggests otherwise.

The call-and-response feel of the evening gives off the energy of a gig, and the onstage band joins Davies in leaving their all right there on stage for everyone to see. And make no mistake: Davies is a wonder, even if the woman she is playing remains largely a cipher right through to the end.

A Night with Janis Joplin is at the Peacock Theatre through 28 September. Book A Night with Janis Joplin tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: A Night with Janis Joplin (Photos by Danny Kaan)