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She sang gospel at the Cotton Club, influenced Elvis’s hip-shaking performance style and Jimi Hendrix’s guitar-playing, and possibly had an affair with her female protégé. The neglected story of musical pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe is ripe for retelling. But the strength of this bio-drama lies in the stunning vocal performances of the great Beverley Knight and newcomer Ntombizodwa Ndlovu, rather than in George Brant’s pedestrian script.
Monique Touko’s stripped-back co-production — seen at Chichester and Kingston last year and on tour with ETT — has a gutsy energy and has been neatly repurposed for this in-the-round West End venue. Soul legend Knight, as usual, is better than the material she’s been given, and she is matched here in passion and power by Ndlovu as Marie Knight, who was plucked by Rosetta from her rival Mahalia Jackson’s support act and turned into a touring partner.
It feels churlish to mention it, but it’s unfortunate that Rosetta’s thrilling ability to play blues guitar — on which 50 per cent of her reputation with aficionados rests — is outsourced, along with Marie’s piano playing, to talented musicians at the corners of the set. However, it’s unfair to expect these two powerful actress-singers also to be genius instrumentalists, of course.
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Anyway, between the thrilling songs, the history of a woman who endured racism, sexism and even the disapproval of her own church is painstakingly reiterated, along with some lore about how the blues grew out of gospel. The show is set in a funeral home, ostensibly in Mississippi in 1946, where the tremulous Marie has been tasked with doing Rosetta’s makeup before they perform together for the first time. This being the segregated South, they’re playing to black audiences in barns and are barred from hotels. They’re sleeping in coffins and relying on their white driver-cum-cook to defray hostility from the authorities.
Prim, churchy Marie is nervous partly because Rosetta is a huge star but also due to her reputation for raunch: Marie’s father hid her naughtier records in different sleeves, while her mother favoured the more pious Mahalia. Rosetta’s first number here is the full-throated, dynamic Didn’t It Rain, while Marie remains demurely seated for her pristine version of the hymn Were You There? Rosetta apologises to God whenever she utters the word “damn”, but she just can’t stop herself cutting loose in person or in performance, hence her estrangement from the congregation where she first started singing.
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When Rosetta suggests Marie could free up her pelvis as well as her contralto, the younger woman is horrified — but also fascinated. She’s not quite as innocent as she seems, having a no-good “squirrel” of a husband (just the one, compared to Rosetta’s several) and two children back at home. She duly moves from pouting disapproval over Rosetta’s arch emphasis on Rock Me to enthusiastically joining her on the lewd I Want a Tall Skinny Papa.
We learn how Rosetta got her start singing under a hail of pennies pelted by gawping whites as a child; how she moved between the church choir and the Cotton Club (where audiences were exclusively white); and the bad luck she had with abusive, exploitative men. The suggestion she had a sexual relationship with Marie is decorously avoided: the one onstage kiss is chaste and valedictory. Laborious foreshadowing from the start hints at the sad courses both women’s lives eventually took.
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It’s good to see these two extraordinary, unfairly sidelined musical icons celebrated, though, and the ponderousness of the script can be forgotten during the exultant songs, which Knight and Ndlovu mostly perform in their stockinged feet, stamping on the funeral home’s shagpile. The four-piece band led by guitarist Shirley Tetteh is up to the challenge.
Never mind the dialogue: this is all about the music.
Marie and Rosetta at @sohoplace, until April 11, sohoplace.org
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