@sohoplace

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...