Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the godmother of rock and roll. Raised by her mother, a travelling Arkansas evangelist, she played guitar and sang on the road from the age of six and grew up to be a huge recording star, touring from church halls to Carnegie Hall via Harlem’s Cotton Club. Her electric guitar-powered classic, ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’, broke gospel music into the R&B charts for the first time in 1945, while sultrier nightclub hits such as ‘I Want a Tall Skinny Papa’ ruffled pentecostal feathers back in Dixieland. Her story and her music are extraordinary. So it’s a privilege and a treat to see British soul goddess Beverly Knight play Rosetta in this intimate two-hander, a play with songs that’s all about the music.
Knight is a singer who raises the hackles on the back of your neck: from the tips of her outstretched fingers to her swiveling hips, her body is an instrument. But she does more here, channeling Rosetta Tharpe in a stomping dramatic performance that conveys the passion, resilience, and sheer physical hard work of her life on the road. Most jukebox shows tell a life story through songs, but this one is more like a staged scene dramatising the relationship between Rosetta and the young Marie Knight, who recorded and toured together for three years. We meet them the night before their first show together: they’re bunking up in a funeral home (the South being too racist for them to rent a room or sleep safely in their van). The setup is a good excuse to run through their set list: gospel pop, electric blues, R&B, all belted immaculately into the enraptured crowd by Knight and Ntombizodwa Ndlovu, a new talent we’ll be seeing more of. Ndlovu is a lovely foil, conveying Marie's potential with a nice blend of arch shyness and tear-jerking lung power.
George Brant’s script feels like an affectionate act of tribute and is, for the most part, a solid scaffold on which to hang the glorious songs. Director Monique Touko’s production is lightly staged, with barely any props, giving it the intimate, special feeling of an acoustic set from awesome musicians. It does feel a little scanty at times - for example, when Marie and Rosetta play air piano and air guitar. The backing band sounds great, but we hardly see them, which seems like a missed opportunity. The action feels rushed and clumsy towards the end, when the years speed forward and horrific biographical events are spliced with tribute quotes from the likes of Elvis in ten break-neck final minutes. But you come away with a strong sense of atmosphere and context and voice – especially Rosetta’s.
The real drama is in the music. Pitched between gospel, jazz and blues; prefiguring rock and roll, it crosses from spiritual to sexy on the thrust of a hip - a moral argument that’s staged as a musical duel, with ‘little sister’ Marie embodying the weepy church-approved spirituals, and the older Rosetta encouraging her to loosen up, swing her hips and get down with the smoky growl of the Harlem Hit Parade. A bolder production might have been less respectful and played their duet more like a seduction (Marie and Rosetta’s relationship was rumoured to be more than professional). But the chemistry remains in the friendzone; sympathetic rather than soul-baring; sisterly rather than sensual. Every time they open their mouths to sing, any quibbles with the production are forgotten and the audience is rapt: finger-tapping, off-beat clapping, irrepressibly grinning. In these moments there is a higher power being channelled, and it’s pure joy to witness it.
