WAAPA graduate John O’Hara on simply the best production Tina - The Tina Turner Musical at Crown Theatre Perth

Wicked’s signature song Defying Gravity was the last thing Melville-raised music theatre performer John O’Hara wanted to hear after spending three years in the hit musical.

Yet after a year in Tina — The Tina Turner Musical, he will still crank up the radio if one of the legendary singer’s iconic numbers comes on.

“I just never get sick of the music,” O’Hara, who is staying in Scarborough during the show’s Crown Theatre Perth season, says.

“I’m a real kid of the 80s and I loved video clips when I was growing up. I used to think I was going to be a pop star, as many kids do, and would get up on Saturday mornings to watch Rage or Video Hits.

“So my earliest memory of her is in the denim jacket and the black dress and her walking along by the fence singing What’s Love Got To Do With It.”

Little did O’Hara — who studied at John Curtin College of the Arts and Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts — know at the time, but he would go on to play What’s Love Got To Do With It lyricist Terry Britten, along with River Deep, Mountain High record producer Phil Spector in a musical celebration of the rock trailblazer’s life on stage.

Spector is a pivotal part of the first act, featuring in the historically accurate 1960s account, where at the peak of his powers he wanted Turner to sing River Deep, Mountain High. The only way he could get her into the studio was by inviting her controlling husband Ike too.

“Once they were there, he said ‘I just want Tina’, which is a great moment because it’s the first time in the piece that someone says ‘no’ to Ike,” 44-year-old O’Hara explains.

“Phil Spector was well known for being a hard taskmaster, so the story goes that he made her sing for hours and hours and hours in the studio until she sang it how he wanted.

“He was quite a crazy cat himself and I guess that’s what’s wonderful about the show too, is that we’re all playing real people, so there’s been no end of reference to research it.”

Britten pops up during the 1980s when Turner’s Australian manager Roger Davies — who now manages Pink and was in Perth with her at the start of March — talks Capitol Records into letting him take Turner to London on a songwriting search.

“At the time, a black woman in her late 40s trying to have a solo career, a record company was like ‘why?’ but Roger had just had a huge hit with Olivia Newton-John’s Physical, so he was in favour with them,” O’Hara recounts.

“Roger knew Terry and they got Tina in a studio and presented her with a bunch of songs. When I sing What’s Love Got To Do With It, she initially hates it, which gets a laugh because of course we all know she records her own, very different version, and it becomes her big first solo hit.

“The audience get really invested in it because Australians just love her, much like Pink. If there’s a modern-day star out there today, that is so successful in Australia specifically, similar to Tina, it would be Pink. Pink sells out more shows here in Australia than she does elsewhere in the world, and Tina was the same.”

Premiered on London’s West End in 2018, Tina — The Tina Turner Musical’s Australian production opened in Sydney at the start of May 2023, starring Melbourne-raised Ruva Ngwenya in the title role, just weeks before Turner died at home in Switzerland.

The singer had famously resisted for years to allow the musical to go ahead until director Phyllida Lloyd visited Switzerland and they received the green light, on the proviso it was produced in association with Turner herself and told the whole story.

“Musical theatre doesn’t often delve into a massive domestic violence storyline or the racism but, when you see the show, you’ll see we really dig into it,” O’Hara says.

“It’s hard to watch but it did happen, and it does happen, and so we need to talk about it to make sure it stops happening.”

The journey across so many decades — from 1950s Nutbush, Tennessee, to the mid-90s as Turner heads off on her first world tour — means fashion plays a huge part in the production, O’Hara wearing eight different wigs throughout the musical.

“The show is a real exploration into the making of a star, where her story is told in two parts, because there are the Ike and Tina years, where no one really knew what was going on at the time,” O’Hara says.

“Then she broke free of him and in act two we kind of get the solo Tina, who we all kind of know and love. It’s a story about a woman who nearly didn’t make it in her own right.

“It’s such a party at the end where we finish with her in concert in Brazil. The last kind of 15 minutes of the show is where you hear hit after hit. The audience is just itching to get on their feet and sing along. Ruva is breathtaking, she’s so cheeky and truly has that essence of Tina.”

Tina — The Tina Turner Musical is at Crown Theatre Perth until April 6, tickets at ticketmaster.com.au.