Theater

‘Janis Joplin’ doesn’t scream Broadway

Enough of these baby­boomer-baiting tribute concerts trying to pass for Broadway musicals! Just months after the Beatles impersonators in “Let It Be” left town comes “A Night With Janis Joplin” — or more exactly, “A Night With Mary Bridget Davies as Janis Joplin,” though that title wouldn’t sell many tickets.

Recent biomusicals “End of the Rainbow” (about Judy Garland) and “Lady Day” (Billie Holiday) reveled in their subjects’ ups and downs, but this estate-approved show mostly sticks to the music. The result is a power-piped but sanitized Joplin (Davies) who’d be perfectly at home on a cruise ship.

The musical is meant to be a gig in 1970, about a week before the singer’s death, at 27. A band of musicians in hippie garb backs her through a selection of hits and one curio: “I’m Gonna Rock My Way to Heaven,” which Jerry Ragovoy, author of “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder),” had written for Joplin, but which she never had the chance to record.

Between songs, Joplin banters amiably and introduces some of her influences, performers like Nina Simone (the excellent De’Adre Aziza, from “Passing Strange”), Bessie Smith (Taprena Michelle Augustine), Aretha Franklin (Allison Blackwell) and Etta James (Nikki Kimbrough). They each provide a bit of background about soul and the blues while giving Davies a break from her vocal-cord-shredding pyrotechnics.

The singer has spent most of her adult life as a Joplin impersonator, and even toured with the surviving members from Big Brother and the Holding Company, one of the late star’s bands. She’s good at what she does.

But Broadway can never reciprocate the intensity and immediacy of a rock show. What it does best is put things in context. ­Exhibit A: “Jersey Boys.”

Sadly, we don’t learn much about what made Joplin who she was.

“All my life I just wanted to be a beatnik,” she says. “Meet all the heavies, get stoned, get laid, have a good time.”

If you want to know why Joplin screamed like a woman possessed, look elsewhere.

Writer-director Randy Johnson has her ramble on about the blues, but in the most banal way.

“I got the blues because I don’t have the quarter for a bottle of wine,” Joplin says. “I got the blues because they won’t let me in that bar.”

In real life, things were more complicated. Maybe Joplin got the blues because she was a woman in the misogynistic world of rock ’n’ roll. Or maybe because she grew up with an artistic temperament in 1960s Texas, surrounded by rednecks who voted her “ugliest man on campus.”

Think about that when “Ball and Chain” explodes in a torrent of agonized shrieks and howls.