[/caption]GHN Editor - Janis Joplin, in the guise of a vibrant, modern lass, popped into Portland on a summer night and took the audience of gray-hairs into rapturous reminiscences, as the ragtime, blues, jazz and solid rock singer made her way front and center on a Portland stage to proclaim once more her central role in the music 60’s revolution. It is a renaissance over which she reigns supreme in a play at the Portland Armory through June 26.
Close your eyes, and you can once more hear and see and feel the old Janis returned in the guise of those in the musical play about her entitled “One Night with Janis Joplin.” She was busted flat in Baton Rouge, and you could hear her wail. She sang of summer in the blues-style masterpiece of "Summertime" she claimed her very own. The pieces of her heart spread out again in the song of that same name, as a talent from long ago came dazzling back in the person of Moriah Angeline.
Selected as the understudy for Cat Stephani, Moriah Angeline took over the part on the afternoon this reviewer saw the play, which brought the audience to its feet time and time again with her resounding voice, her delivery of the Joplin magic once again. Angeline, according to her biography, has loved Janis Joplin all her life and is therefore able to dissolve into the character in a transforming manner that chills and thrills as the original Janis did so many years ago.
Sabrina Elayne Carten plays the Blues Singer, adding her incredible talent as a counterpoint to Angeline’s lusty songs. She begins with the soprano notes that soared to theater heavens in her rendition of Summertime before the character of Janis took the song and hit it home again. Both styles played well to audiences familiar with the song, but these special talents seemed to make it new. Carten sings with full throated authority the blues in a voice that renders it as classical, tender, wonderful and filled with the spirit of the style she has performed on stage in Houston Grand Opera, New Orleans Opera, LA Opera in Porgy and Bess and in Live from Lincoln Center as well as other venues. Her understudy, Marisha Wallace, appears in her debut at Portland Center Stage. She too has that authentic, take charge mastery that added to the cast.
Joplin, according to the program for the production, is “among the greatest, most powerful singers” with a “high, husky, earthy, explosive” voice that was “the most distinctive and galvanizing in pop history” as she “threw herself into every syllable, testifying from the very core of her being.” That kind of testifying was made once again in Portland by the dazzling cast of “One Night with Janis Joplin, a don’t-miss-it wonderful this writer recommends.
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- Janis Joplin fans - (Forsloff photo)
