Phyllida Lloyd, director
When I was six I bought River Deep with my pocket money. There was something about the voice and the sound. I was a fan from the earliest of ages.
But I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved in another big commercial musical after Mamma Mia! as I didn’t think I’d have the same luck twice. I know how astronomically high the stakes are when putting these shows together.
But the combination of producer Tali Pelman’s tenacity and the opportunity to work with Tina, I knew there was an opportunity for something substantial; it wouldn’t just be throwing a few Tina songs at the stage.I met her first in 2017, when she came over for a workshop. I had dinner with her, Tali and her husband Irwin. I was apprehensive but she was just so disarmingly friendly and open.
She had a way of putting people at their ease and putting herself in their shoes; she really empathised with her audience. For someone who had been standing apart from the crowd that was quite phenomenal.
I remember a story that before she had made it big again, she had a gig booked in a small country in the USSR. Her manager Roger said, “You’re really tired it’s so far away, only 44 people have booked... we really can cancel.” And she said, “No, they’ll be so disappointed.” That empathy really set her apart.
Tina worked harder for her audience than anyone can think of. She was just a real grafter and set that example to us. And she was tremendous fun.She had been through so much suffering, but she still would pinch herself to ask how had she got here from Nutbush. She never took it for granted.
There’s a lovely memory of when we did a launch for the show in Europe. She was going to sing a bit of Proud Mary and she started talking to the band and you thought, “Here she is in her element.” You were back there witnessing her in her joy, in her hard won joy.
When she died it was an enormously sad moment. Some of us knew she had fragilities and endured a lot of health issues.
For those playing her on stage it was like the blood draining from their veins for a moment. Then came the sense of renewed purpose to keep her legacy alive. Which was what it was about from the first moment.
There was a period after her passing where it was an extraordinary intense and sacred space. We had that when we first came back from the pandemic – that was one of the greatest nights of theatre I’d ever experience – it felt like church. And it felt like church after her passing. It was like a sacred commemoration in the spirit of the South where she came from.
Tali Pelman, producer
I met Tina in 2014. I went to Zurich to meet with her and her husband to convince her to say yes to making the musical. They say never meet your heroes, but the opposite applies here; she was everything you would have wanted her to be and more.
I went into her home and shook hands. She looked beautiful and she said, “We’re not going to do the musical, the answer is no, but let’s have a great dinner.” There was no pretence, no airs, no politics. Just total honesty. That’s just who she was.
We stayed there to 2am and by the end of the night she said yes, it was amazing. I think she changed her mind because we wanted to tell the story honestly, with all its peaks and troughs, and that was key to her. I think that was different to what may have been offered to her in the past.
And I feel she was the same privately and publicly. If you imagine her on stage, she would talk about it being a physical sport. She would use the metaphor of the racehorse getting ready for a race. It was so highly physical. She would talk about how sweaty she used to get. She would stick to the stage but she would keep giving to the audience. She allowed herself to be unpolished to give authenticity to the people. She was the same in person.
She made her fans feel seen, and sung to and talked to by someone real. That is really unusual and really striking. She wasn’t a diva, she was quite the opposite. Nobody worked harder.
Early on, I snuck her into a preview. Nobody knew she was there and they never did know. We snuck her out just before the end after and took her to her hotel. She was incredibly moved by it, in fact she moved me to tears. She said she wished her mum and Ike could have seen it which was obviously quite a shocking thing to say because obviously they were perpetrators of most of the abuse she suffered in her life. And yet there was a catharsis in the making of the show that brought her to peace with it. She said we found the love.
We tried to capture what she meant to people. She worried about her legacy a lot, about what her fans would do when she’s no longer here. She would receive thousands of letters in her 70s and the show was a way to answer them.
It’s extraordinary how she moved people. It wasn’t just her ability to survive hardship, but to overcome it and live a life full of joy, and joy as she definied it. No one defined her and that moves people when they see the show.
It was devastating when she died, a truly devastating loss. But it was so extraordinary to see this response around this world. It was overwhelming. And the need for people to say what she meant.
I was very grateful to know her.
