LOVE, JANIS, ECCLES CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, Park City, Saturday; running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes (one intermission)
Part biography, part concert and part theater, "Love, Janis" came to Park City for one night only on Saturday, playing to a full house at the Eccles Center for the Performing Arts. Randal Myler wrote the script, based on the book by the same name, which was written by Janis Joplin's sister, Laura.
Columbia Artists Theatricals produces the national tour, in which monologues of Joplin's words (taken from her letters to her family and from interviews she gave to the press) alternate with more than a dozen of her songs. In the Utah performance, Marisa Ryan spoke her words and Mary Bridget Davies sang her songs.
(The two roles are shared among three women. The third Janis, who had the night off in Utah, is Katrina Chester.)
Davies sounds amazingly like Joplin. She doesn't look much like Joplin, but she is quite satisfying in the role. As for Ryan, she couldn't be sweeter. Her soft Texas accent, as she recites Joplin's words, manages to make the rock star sound both plucky and lonely.
The band is great. Mark Alexander plays keyboard, Ben Nieves and Tim Brawn play guitar, Jim Wall is on drums and Eric Massimino is on bass.
The set is simple and effective. Scenes from San Francisco provide the backdrop when Joplin speaks. The backdrop for the band is a full-on psychedelic light show.
If this production lacks anything, it is more insight into Joplin's relationship with her family. In her early letters, she pleads with her mother to write to her. Then when her mom does write, Joplin pleads for her to come to visit.
We don't find out if her family did come to San Francisco. We don't find out what they knew about her heroin addiction — if they knew she'd been clean for a time before her final overdose in 1970.
Probably 90 percent of the Utah audience consisted of people who looked to be in their late 50s, just the right age to have loved her, to have started listening to "Big Brother and the Holding Company," right about the time Joplin was thinking she needed to move on.
Maybe a good number of those in the audience have read Laura Joplin's book. They may know all they need to know about the family's history. Or maybe they didn't care, maybe they were thinking about their own lives, their own struggles growing up in the late 1960s.
At any rate, the audience seemed to love the show. When Joplin died, when some newspaper clippings about her death flashed on the screen, the man sitting next to me began to cry.
Sensitivity rating: Janis used the f-word.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com