Adrienne Warren Stands Up

She opened in Tina so badly hurt she could barely walk. Then came another mountain to climb.

- By Jackson McHenry

ON NOVEMBER 6, 2019, the night before she opened in the starring role of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, Adrienne Warren developed a herniated disk in her back—though she didn’t know it yet. She just knew she was in pain. Her friends came over to her house and put her into a hot bath, then an ice bath to soothe her muscles. They fed her chicken to get her protein. “I was crying,” she remembers, “because I knew that Tina was there, and Oprah was coming, and all these people were counting on me, and I couldn’t walk.” Her doctor helped, but there wasn’t time for diagnostic tests, so the next day, Warren made it to the theater, barely. Backstage, Daniel J. Watts, who plays Ike Turner, held her upright. Then the curtain rose, and Oprah and Tina and everyone else watched Warren dance and sing on her own. “No one knew” the extent of the injury at the time, she says. “I had to get through.”

When the reviews came in that night, critics were tepid on the musical itself—but described Warren in terms typically reserved for acts of God: She “rocks the rafters,” said the New York Times; at New York, we called her work “gigantic” and “tidal”;