Me and Bobby McGee and Janis: Star talks ‘A Night With Janis Joplin’

Growing up in Ohio, Mary Bridget Davies knew she had a unique talent.

But for a while, that's all she knew.

“I’ve been listening to her since I was a kid, and I could sing like her,” said Davies, the star of “A Night With Janis Joplin,” which plays the Fox Theatre Sunday night. “But it was like, OK, that’s sort of a strange gift to have. When are you ever going to use it?”

“Her” is Joplin, the raspy-voiced, bluesy rock star who shot to fame in the mid-1960s and produced unforgettable music (“Me and Bobby McGee,” “Cry Baby,” “Mercedes Benz”) before dying of a heroin overdose in 1970 at the age of 27.

And “use” that gift well Davies undeniably has. The show, which was commissioned by the Joplin estate, began playing at regional theaters in 2011; Davies, now 37, took over the lead role in her hometown of Cleveland in July 2012 and stayed with it all the way to Broadway, where it opened in October 2013.

That run was short-lived — the show closed four months later — but Davies’ performance was universally acclaimed (“positively uncanny,” The New York Times noted) and she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical.

“I was in bed in New York City and there was Lucy Liu saying the names and I thought, ‘I surely didn’t hear what I heard,’” Davies, who lost to Jessie Mueller in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” told Playbill. “Maybe I was hallucinating, I thought.”

Not hallucinating — and not imitating Joplin either.

“Many people say I channel her,” said Davies, whose rare talent began to flourish as she listened to her parents’ albums and then became progressively honed and “harnessed” in her 20s. “I’m not an impersonator, not someone who puts on (Joplin’s signature oversized) glasses and chirps ‘Bobby McGee’ on a cruise line. That’s not what we’re doing.”

Instead, “A Night With Janis Joplin” has Davies singing plenty, but also recounting Joplin’s upbringing in Texas, her early years as a performer in San Francisco and the famed female blues and soul singers who played such formative roles in the development of her musical style.

And Davies’ Janis doesn’t just talk about it. She also shares the stage with a powerhouse group of performers playing “influencers” like Bessie Smith, Etta James, Odetta and Nina Simone.

"That's the really beautiful part, it's not just a Janis Joplin show," Davies said. "It's also all these informed performances from other iconic women that Janis looked up to."

As for those other “influences,” drugs, this show isn’t about that.

“It’s more about her as an artist and how she became who she was, not the heroin and the other stuff,” said Davies, who thinks that keeps the focus squarely on what made Joplin a uniquely important artist. “She was so uncompromising. … Even today, grown adults are afraid to be themselves because of social constructs, but (Joplin) refused to be put in a box and labeled and it’s why she was so passionately connected to her music.

“People will think ‘I wish I could get up on a stage and scream from the rooftops like that,’” said Davies, who’s been doing it for years herself. “It’s cathartic. It’s like paid therapy. I love my job!”