'Love, Janis' Opens Theatre Aspen Season

June 29th, 2006 at 06:28am Michael Conniff 2

“Love, Janis”
Conceived, Adapted, and Directed by Randall Myler
Inspired by the book “Love, Janis” by Laura Joplin

“I'm a survivor,” Janis Joplin famously said—but it wasn’t that simple. If the morphine doesn’t kill you, the heroin will, even if you have a talent as big as Texas.

The singer Janis Joplin—and the word “singer” is woefully inadequate—was larger than life but not nearly large enough to overcome the dose of drugs that killed her in 1970. Wailer, crooner, shouter, screamer, belter—no combination of words can account for what Janis Joplin summoned directly from her soul like a sorcerer of the Sixties.

Even with her demise into legendary status, Janis Joplin does not have quite the purchase on pop culture enjoyed by Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, the two other pied pipers of their times ultimately mummified by drugs. One consolation is “Love, Janis,” based on a book of the singer’s letters put together by her sister, Laura Joplin—and another is the musical drama of the same name that marries the authenticity of a Joplin performance with the words she sent back home to Port Arthur, Texas. Interviews by journalists incorporated into the musical help to complete a picture by turns tragic and dramatic.

Her sister chose Randall Myler to adapt the book, and he will also direct the Theatre Aspen version of “Love, Janis.” Bringing contemporary music to the stage always puts Myler in his milieu: he directed “It Ain’t Nothing But The Blues,” and brought the Hank Williams story onto off-Broadway as “Lost Highways.” Myler has also developed “California Dreamin’” about the Mamas and Papas.

There is even an Aspen connection: Randall Myler spent not only spent several years working with the late local John Denver, but directed “Almost Heaven” about his life and songs.

Even with all that experience staging stories about singers, capturing Janis Joplin on stage is not without its challenges for Myler or anyone else who tries to understand the DNA of her passion and anger. “Piece Of My Heart,” with Big Brother and the Holding Company, was the only top 40 hit Joplin produced with that band. The album “Pearl” was a #1 hit and so was the anthemic single “Me and Bobby McGee”—but they both came out after her death from the overdose.

Rock critic Lillian Roxon writes that Janis “perfectly expressed the feelings and yearnings of the girls of the electric generation—to be all woman, yet equal with men; to be free, yet a slave to real love; to [reject] every outdated convention, and yet get back to the basics of life.”

Like Hendrix, Morrison, and Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin was a lost soul who never had the chance to finish her own story. She left behind a minimal body of work and a powerful musical imprint that remains as raw and unmistakeable as any artist’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Spiritually speaking, this production of “Love, Janis” gives Janis Joplin the chance to be seen and heard—and for us to have another little piece of her heart.

Entry Filed under: Music, Theater, Aspen, Pitkin County