Broadway’s 'Tina' conveys the late singer’s charisma
'TINA' runs through Sunday at Belk Theater uptown
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on June 11, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.
‘TINA – The Tina Turner Musical’ is long on hit songs, which connect an overextended narrative. Meghan Dawson galvanizes us as Tina Turner.
“TINA – The Tina Turner Musical” follows Turner’s journey to becoming a 12-time Grammy Award-winning artist, set to the soundtrack of her biggest hits. (Photo courtesy of Blumenthal Arts)
By Lawrence Toppman
Driving to Belk Theater on Tuesday on the day of Sylvester Stewart’s death, I heard Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher” on Sirius XM. An hour later, I heard it onstage during the national tour of “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.” I checked, and sure enough: The cover version by Tina and husband Ike topped Sly’s on the U.S. charts in 1969. That woman showed up everywhere.
Some of what she was and did finds its way into this overstuffed, appealing, simplistic and glorious tuneful biography, which she worked on (and presumably approved) in the decade before her death in 2023.
The book by Katori Hall, Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins ignores inconvenient facts. Capitol Records executives are depicted as idiots who won’t fund a solo album after she and Ike break up, but she had already recorded four solo albums for United Artists that didn’t yield big bucks. Future husband Erwin Bach met her two years after she cut the immensely popular “Private Dancer” album. Here, he provides emotional support while she struggles to get it right.
Yet the nearly two dozen songs, most of them delivered with unique flair by Meghan Dawson as Tina, gloss over imperfections. She’s not a physical ringer for Turner, who was leggier, less bosomy and more muscular. (Lines about Tina’s famously long legs seem odd in this context.) Yet Dawson embodies the role, following Turner’s phrasing without imitating her voice. She’s a smoother, less gritty singer who sustains long notes with power and accuracy that Turner didn’t always have.
Charlotte native Taylor Brice, 10, has exuberance, a soaring voice and stage presence as a young Tina Turner, known then as Anna Mae Bullock. (Photo courtesy of Blumenthal Arts)
The writers have thoughtfully incorporated Turner’s music with and without Ike in ways that serve the story and let us reimagine possibilities for the songs. “Let’s Stay Together” becomes an ironic song for Tina and her ill-fated lover in Ike’s band. “Better Be Good to Me” is now a warning to the philandering, abusive Ike to treat her properly or expect retribution.
At the same time, the script paints everything in primary colors. Ike might as well have horns and a forked tail; he’s a sleazy seducer from the get-go, and we never see one sign of the man Tina later told interviewers she genuinely loved early on. Her mother abandons, then neglects, then nags Tina and swiftly pimps her to Ike, regretting these actions only in a mawkish deathbed confession.
We hear Tina repeat a Buddhist chant throughout the show in an attempt to find serenity, but it’s not given any more context than the Native American prayers recited by her grandmother. Turner believed she had Native American roots and embraced Buddhism in the second half of her life, but you’d have to know that.
She’s basically portrayed as a three-decade victim of her parents, husband and the recording industry, until an Australian producer believes in her and masterminds the “Private Dancer” project. Only Tina’s indomitable will and persistence yield the breakthrough she richly deserves. I don’t say that ironically — she did deserve it and had world-class talent — but there would have been room for more subtlety and honesty in a three-hour show.
Sterling Baker-McClary does all that can be done with the vicious, drugged-out and then sniveling Ike, and I wished he’d had more to sing than bits of duets and Ike’s biggest hit, “Rocket 88.” Nia Simone Smith and Deidre Lang were hissable and huggable as Tina’s mom and grandma, though I had a queasy feeling when the audience cheered Mama’s injunction to beat Ike savagely if he beat Tina. We shouldn’t want her to stand by her man, but should we want her to stand over his unconscious body?
Even if Taylor Brice were not performing for her hometown crowd in Charlotte, I’d praise her lovely performance as young Tina, who was then Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tenn. Brice’s exuberance, soaring voice and stage presence mark her as a 10-year-old luminary in the making.
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If You’re Going
“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” runs at Belk Theatre, 130 N. Tryon St., through June 15. Shows are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday.
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Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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