Watching footage of Janis Joplin at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, you can see why Mama Cass, sitting in the crowd, keeps shaking her head. There's Janis, decked out in full gold lame and tiny mules, shaking and snarling her way through "Ball and Chain" as if she's tearing apart a small animal.
The performance is part Muddy Waters, part Bridget Jones, a wild collision of mojo and nerd. Writing about it for Rolling Stone, Rosanne Cash described Joplin as some kind of nuclear being bearing down on the crowd. She had an unshakable commitment to her own truth, no matter how destructive, weird or bad.
The beauty and the power of Joplin as a singer came from her complete lack of fear. She held nothing back. By contrast, "Love, Janis," playing this weekend at the Wilshire Theatre, takes a more mellow spin through the last years of Joplin's short life, from her early breakout performances in San Francisco to her final days in Los Angeles in October 1970.
Backed by a high-energy band, Joplin the singer is portrayed by an exuberant Mary Bridget Davies (alternating with Andra Mitrovich), her spoken self by Marisa Ryan. The notion of dual Joplins makes dramatic sense: How better to mine the gap between the rock goddess who made love to 20,000 people with a song and the awkward college student at the University of Texas who was once nominated for 'ugliest man on campus"?
But this easygoing concert show -- conceived, adapted and directed by Randal Myler from a biography by Laura Joplin, the singer's sister -- keeps its distance from the performer's depths. On the one hand, it's refreshing to take a break from rock-star cliches, but this pioneer geek hippie chick lived pretty large, and Myler's tribute show, despite a full-throttle effort from Davies, contains its subject rather than opening her up. No mention is made of her numerous affairs with women, and her struggle with substance abuse is barely touched on. This is definitely G-rated Janis.
"Love, Janis" is also a little time capsule of Haight-Ashbury, land of velvet bell bottoms, feather boas and love beads. Colorful psychedelia appears on upstage screens during concert scenes, and the band plays as if it's tripping out with thousands of acid-dropping fans. The only spoken text is taken from interviews Joplin gave and letters she wrote to her family.
