Photo By Sandy Underwood

The many faces of Janis Joplin: Katrina Hallet portrays various aspects of the passionate Rock singer.

A week or so ago I walked up and down Main Street in Over-the-Rhine, enjoying the MidPoint Music Festival, listening to bands and singers pursuing fame -- and pain. It's hard to make it in the music business; it's equally tough to make it and pay the price of fame. Just ask Janis Joplin. Well, you can't ask her, because she blazed through the early Rock & Roll firmament in the late 1960s in a fiery arc that left her dead at 27 in 1970. But what a glorious -- and sad -- legend she created. She's not exactly being brought back to life in the Cincinnati Playhouse's production of Love, Janis, but her memory is powerfully evoked, and her artistry is honored and stunningly re-created.

Love, Janis is not a documentary. Playwright Randal Myler worked with Laura Joplin, whose book about her older sister was woven around letters she wrote home between 1966 and 1970 and newspaper interviews from the same period. The result is a rather reverential homage to Joplin's raw talent; it's not hard to see how a family member might portray her older sister in a forgiving light.

That's not to say that Love, Janis avoids the truth. Joplin's devil-may-care attitudes, her steady drinking, the drug abuse that cut her life short are all portrayed. She's no hero; it's pretty obvious she avoided giving her family -- living back in Port Arthur, Texas -- most of the sordid details about her life when she became part of the Rock scene in San Francisco as she rose to fame fronting for Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Joplin sought and struggled with fame. At first she yearned for it: "Everyone seems to be taken with my singing," she innocently tells her mother in a letter. But before long, she's struggling with the weight of her notoriety. "It isn't easy living up to Janis Joplin," she says later, and bemoans, "I'm as much a folk hero as a singer." That's the sad and poignant recognition in Love, Janis, the struggle between her music and her soul that Joplin eventually lost.

Playwright and director Myler bares Joplin's soul by dividing her into two roles. The introspective, private Janis (Morgan Hallett) voices the letters and most of the interviews. The public, performing Janis (played at alternating shows by Katrina Chester and Lauren Dragon) sings and portrays her stage persona. Frequently they are both onstage -- watching, encouraging, commiserating, comforting, even finishing one another's sentences in response to disembodied questions from a reporter. None of the actresses physically impersonate Joplin, but each captures dimensions of who she was.

Hallett is engaging in the private role, although perhaps a little too golly-gee-whiz: She frequently exclaims "Oh, hey" as she jumps from one disjointed thought to another in Joplin's letters home. Too often she sounds more like a breathless teen than the hard-drinking rocker, but perhaps that's a contrast Myler had in mind --the vulnerable girl inside the rough exterior. Regardless, Hallett is prettier and more petite than the woman she portrays.

The singers offer divergent but equally satisfying musical recreations of Joplin. (I saw Chester, who played the role in New York City, on opening night and Dragon, who's from Cincinnati, at the show's second performance on Sept. 30.) Chester is a singer and an actress; she captures Joplin's no-holds-barred performing style, and her re-creation of the shrieking, unrestrained singing is powerful. While Dragon does not have Chester's acting chops, she better represents Joplin's electric stage presence. She is also a singer of greater breadth, performing each song -- the show offers 18 of them -- in the key Joplin originally used. Dragon also personifies Joplin's grit and passion in a breathtaking way. Her abandon transported her performance to a place that moved the audience profoundly.

Lorraine Venberg's costumes lend credibility to the re-creation of Joplin and the era -- sometimes she's a hippie-chick, sometimes a star wannabe, always a woman expressing herself without reservation. The actresses often wear matching costumes, a reminder that they are different aspects of the same woman.

And she's a woman whose pain we feel profoundly. Joplin's yearning for love and recognition is palpable. In her letters home, she continually seeks her family's approval. We hear about the men who came and went. We see her search for love -- an emotion she only genuinely felt when baring her soul musically in front of an audience.

You sense that yearning in her music. It's given vivid context by a band fronted by two extraordinary guitarists, Joel Hoekstra and Eric Massimino. They manage the riffs and technique that typified Big Brother and the Holding Company (original band member Sam Andrew is the show's musical director), conjuring an air not unlike what I heard at MidPoint a few days earlier -- a sheer rebellious joy in noise and music.

Photo By Sandy Underwood

The many faces of Janis Joplin: Morgan Hallett (left) and Lauren Dragon (right) portray various aspects of the passionate Rock singer.

Joplin wore a piece of her heart on her sleeve, and she sang it out loud -- way loud -- for all the world to hear, an acknowledgment that she had nothing left to lose. The singers in Love, Janis evoked her searing pain and moved audiences profoundly. If you care about Rock music, you owe it to yourself to see Love, Janis. Grade: A