When you’re reliving scenes of someone else’s chaotic, traumatic life, you need a place of calm.
For actor and singer Ruva Ngwenya, star of the Australian production of the Tina Turner Musical, it’s her fairy-lit dressing room at the Theatre Royal.
“It’s a place of refuge,” says Ngwenya. “Resting is how I get ready. I sleep, no talking. I’m resting the mind and the body, because once I’m on stage it’s an extraordinarily high-focus and high-energy three hours.”
When the Guardian meets with Ngwenya, she is three previews into the musical’s premiere season; it opens officially on Thursday. And judging by a performance last week, it looks likely to be a star-making vehicle for the 30-year-old.
“It was very daunting at first, but now it’s feeling really good,” Ngwenya says. “It’s billed as a musical but for me it’s actually more like a play. I’m telling Tina’s life story and it gets quite tough. I’m confronting sexism, racism and ageism, and that can be challenging. You have to set yourself up mentally so that you’re not overcome by it and it brings you down. But at the end, it opens out to a concert and the band is on stage and we all get to party with the audience. For me that’s the big payoff.”
A jukebox musical that debuted in London’s Aldwych Theatre in 2018, TINA transferred to Broadway the following year – before pausing due to the pandemic.
The show follows Tina Turner (born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939) from her troubled childhood in rural Tennessee, to her years on the southern R&B circuit with bandleader (and future husband) Ike Turner played by Tim Omaji; it charts her rise to fame, years of domestic violence, and the career crash that nearly claimed her life.
The cast and live band smash out 20 of Turner’s biggest hits, including Nutbush City Limits, Better Be Good to Me, What’s Love Got to Do With It and Proud Mary, and – quite movingly – her earlier 1960s hits with Ike Turner, A Fool in Love and River Deep, Mountain High.
And Ngwenya barely leaves the stage. She’s like an athlete pacing herself through the acting scenes (including difficult scenes of domestic violence), with the enormous vocal strength she needs to nail Turner’s exuberant and powerful style. She captures her range too – from the 17-year-old singer who turned Ike’s head, to the R&B belter, and, most expertly, the older singer with a raspier, husky voice stretching out her vowel sounds.
Then there’s the dancing. Turner famously created her own moves and Ngwenya throws herself into the strutting, the swaggering, and the fast, jerky, hopping steps, all performed in high heels. The vibe is smoking hot, and the costume changes blink-fast: cast mates might come on to quickly change a wig while Ngwenya wiggles out of one dress to reveal another, as she shimmies through the 1960s dresses to the skin-tight red leather numbers, the spangly beaded minidresses, and the huge fright wigs.
The audience can’t hold back from singing along, especially when the Australian connection kicks in – Turner had an Australian manager, Roger Davies, during the 1980s, she performed in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, her hit Simply The Best was a promo for the NRL, and she toured here many times. Preview audiences have been quick with the standing ovations, and the show rewards them with mega-mix encores.
It ends on a triumphant note, the comeback that began with the release of 1984’s Private Dancer – the multimillion selling album that led to Turner being the oldest women to ever top the Billboard chart. She was 44. Turner went on to sell more concert tickets than any solo performer in the world. She is one of only three women in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and she’s been inducted twice – first with Ike Turner in 1991, and again as a solo artist in 2021.
“The odds were stacked against her so many times in her life,” says Ngwenya. “Childhood abandonment, domestic violence, losing everything in her divorce … and that’s before you even get into the sexism, racism and ageism she faced throughout her career. But she pushed and pushed, always looked for a yes. She never gave up.”
Ruva Ngwenya’s full name is Ruvarashe – “God’s flower” in the Shona language she grew up speaking in Melbourne, as the child of Zimbabwean migrants. “We spoke Shona at home and I still cherish it,” she says.
Music was important too. “It’s how we mourn, celebrate, party, all of the things,” Ngwenya says. “But no one in my family is a musician. My musical talent kind of came from nowhere.”
Ngwenya became known as the girl who sang all the way to school; once there, she would draw pictures of microphones on her notebooks. “My party trick was that I could imitate Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. I thought I was just good at mimicking, but it was actually that I could sing.”
Unlike her idols, however, Ngwenya drew next to no inspiration from the church she attended. “I think we all know what an Aussie Christian church is like. I mean, church singing in Australia is not like in Africa or America. Boring hymns and an organ,” she says, laughing. “Big nah.”
Despite her love of singing, Ngwenya didn’t see herself as a performer. “I was all about volleyball and netball at the time and I thought people who did music and theatre were, you know … a bit lame,” she says.
But at 15, she was cast in a high school musical, the jukebox musical Leader of the Pack. It wasn’t an easy role – Ngwenya wasn’t a lead, but she performed River Deep Mountain High, the 1966 song producer Phil Spector turned into a wall-of-sound spectacular with Tina Turner on lead vocals.
“It was incredible, like a euphoric moment,” Ngwenya recalls. “Like, ‘wow, you guys need to see the high school musical because Ruva is in it and she can sing!’”
With encouragement from her school drama teacher, music was no longer just a party trick. She went on to study music (jazz vocals) at the Victorian College of the Arts – but dropped out when the X Factor came knocking in 2013. She got to the top six for her category and was flown to London, but was eliminated before the live shows.
The brief stint on the show was enough: she was invited to join the cast of the Australian production of Disney’s The Lion King. She moved to Sydney for it – at just 21. “It was pretty huge for me.”
Roles in musicals including We Will Rock You, Carole King the Musical, Ragtime, Dusty and Moulin Rouge followed. Tina Turner is her first lead.
“TINA is truly a triple threat’s role. You’re singing, dancing, acting. Everything I’ve ever done has led me here,” she says. It took 12 rounds of auditions to get the job – “the most full-on thing” she’s ever done.
“I read books, I watched the documentaries. I watched everything I could find, I researched Buddhism, watched every movie Tina was in, every interview I could find on YouTube. I was soaking in Tina Turner.”
That kind of preparation has paid dividends. “I’ve got to the point where I’m backstage before the show, I breathe in and breathe out, and I make the choice that Ruva has left the building and Tina is here for the next three hours.
“You have to transcend the physical appearance stuff,” she says. “It’s more about transporting the audience to that point where they believe in you and are invested in your story.”
Turner lived in the spotlight with the media documenting every move – and perversely, some fans are more obsessed with her legs than her voice. “Sometimes I think I’m as famous for my legs as much as my voice,” Turner told The Sun in April. She’s now 84, and living a quiet life in Switzerland with her husband. “I only had my legs on show so much as it made it much easier to dance … then it became part of my style.”
Inevitably, there will always be people who “compare the legs” Ngwenya says. “But I don’t care about any of that stuff! This thing about Tina’s legs? Honey, I’ve got curvy legs! I don’t have the same body type but I can move, I’ve got the stamina and the energy for this show and I absolutely love the way I look.”
Back in her dressing room, Ngwenya points out quotes from Buddhist texts, a speech by Nelson Mandela and photos of young Tina Turner. “I surround myself with words of encouragement so I can stay focused on the bigger reason for doing things,” she says. “The story we are telling – Tina’s story – is very inspiring and I hope anyone coming to the show who might be having a tough time can feel motivated to make a shift in their life.”
But it’s also a party show. “It’s absolutely a feelgood show. It goes off at the end. When the audience is up dancing, I feel like I’ve made it,” she says, laughing again. “I’ve made it.”
TINA: The Tina Turner Musical is playing at Sydney’s Theatre Royal until October
