Top of her game

Nearly A century before Tina Turner's current and possibly final tour, Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest actress of her time, made a similar journey. At 71, Bernhardt did not possess the remarkable health the 68-year-old Turner displayed Monday at the Staples Center. Instead of flashing two still-mighty legs for everyone to admire, Bernhardt hid one under her skirts; the other had been amputated after an infection, and she sat in a chair to deliver her soliloquies. Yet the Divine Sarah's voice and physical charisma still enraptured audiences in the U.S. and beyond, and the very fact of the tour, so seemingly defiant of mortality, added to an already considerable legend.

Turner, who Thursday returns to the Staples Center, is making her claim for eternal glory in sports arenas across the nation right now. Coaxed out of retirement by her friend Oprah Winfrey, she's put together a tribute to herself that bursts out of the gate at full speed, assaulting the audience with sounds and images from throughout Turner's 50-year career. Unlike such other backward-looking divas as Cher or even Janet Jackson, Turner remained focused on forward motion: Even as the show's elaborate set pieces dramatized highlights from her past, the singer pushed her voice and body in a performance that was all about her prowess right now.

In more than two hours onstage, Turner shimmied, strutted and did the funky chicken, wearing designer miniskirts that replaced her signature fringe with figure-flattering sequins. She was supported but never topped by four dancers probably one-third her age. She fearlessly ran down a ramp extending above the audience, flawlessly descended a staircase in stilettos and tirelessly shook her mane of a wig as she worked through the soul-rock gems in her catalog.

Turner's moves transcended sexual expression to become superhuman, the miraculous athleticism of a woman who's moved beyond life's stages into some other state of eternal strength.

If this sounds dramatic, don't forget that, like Bernhardt, Turner is a figure whose artistic genius is all tied up in her physicality -- and in a biography marked by physical hardship and survival. This career-spanning show never referred to her former husband, the late Ike Turner, who helped Tina establish herself artistically, only to violently abuse her. Yet the defiance and stoicism expressed in many of Turner's songs become more affecting in light of what she's endured.