WHATEVER thoughts Tina Turner had about the death last week of her ex-husband, Ike Turner, she kept to herself. Her spokes woman told the BBC: “Ike and Tina Turner had no contact in 35 years, and no further comment will be made.”
But judging from the script she’s written for an autobiographical musical, it’s clear Tina still hates Ike.
“Simply the Best” portrays Ike Turner as a gun-wielding, cocaine-sniffing, wife-beating monster whose signature line is: “That bitch will taste my wrath like it’s her own saliva!”
All that, plus he’s the reincarnation of the tyrannical Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III.
But more on that daffy detail later.
“Simply the Best,” which is aiming for London production next year before heading to Broadway, is the latest stage show trying to cash in on the back catalog and back story of a music icon.
Like the hugely successful “Jersey Boys” – which charts the rise of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons – “Simply the Best” uses Turner’s hit songs to dramatize her path from cotton-picking poverty to rock superstardom.
Among the songs in the show are “Nutbush City Limits,” “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” “Let’s Stay Together,” “Private Dancer” and, inevitably, “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”
A top-secret workshop of the musical was staged a year ago in London.
No auditions were held. Theater agents received discreet phone calls inviting their clients to take part in a “rehearsed reading of a new musical.”
The actors got the script the day before the reading. When they arrived at a dingy rehearsal studio in southeast London, they were shocked to find Turner, in full-diva regalia, there to greet them.
“She was every inch the star, but charming and gracious and overwhelmed by the reading,” a source says.
A few weeks ago, the casting director for the show slipped into New York to check out Fantasia in “The Color Purple.” Word is he was knocked out by her performance, though there’s some concern she isn’t sexy enough to play Turner.
There should also be concern that Fantasia comes to work only when the spirit moves her. If she winds up starring in “Simply the Best,” they’ll have to rename it “Missing You.”
“Simply the Best” closely tracks “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” the absorbing 1993 Tina Tuner biopic that starred Angela Bassett and, as Ike, Laurence Fishburne.
We follow little Anna Mae from Nutbush, Tenn., to St. Louis, where Ike discovers her singing at the Club D’Lisa. They ride to the top together, but when it becomes clear that record executives are more interested in Tina as a performer than they are in Ike, he turns violent and abusive.
Eventually, they divorce, and Tina, at 42, her career seemingly over, reinvents herself as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1980s.
The musical goes wacky when it shifts to Ancient Egypt.
Tina believes she’s the reincarnation of Hatshepsut, whose reign from 1479 to 1458 B.C. was prosperous and peaceful. Hatshepsut prevented her evil stepson, Thutmose III (that’s Ike), from assuming the throne (though he seized it when she died).
The Egyptian queen watches over Tina. When Ike pulls a gun on Tina, Hatshepsut shields her and the gun “leaps” out of Ike’s hand (special effects!).
All of this has to go, of course.
“Simply the Best” isn’t bad at all – Tina Turner’s life story is remarkable, her songs theatrical.
Cut the “Aida” mumbo-jumbo, Tina, and you might have a winner here.