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A Determined Rocker Takes on Broadway
from: nytimes.com
by Robin Finn
Stripped down to the bare essentials — tattoos and a tiger-stripe bikini thong — between costume changes for a publicity shoot at the Circle in the Square Theater, Joan M. Jett seems less formidable than the sneering, snarling bad-girl-of-rock reputation that preceded her to Broadway. Her speaking voice is a tired contralto, and beneath a rainbow of lid-to-brow stage makeup, her left eye is flecked with blood: she spent the morning at the hospital having a piece of theater grit extracted by her favorite physician, the one she entrusts with her vocal cords. But Ms. Jett's "Rocky Horror Show" understudy won't inherit her dual roles as Columbia and Usherette, or that solo wail on guitar in "The Time Warp," tonight.
No one has ever called Ms. Jett a quitter. When 23 record companies declined to produce her first album, dismissing a leather-wrapped, guitar-slinging teenage girl as offensively unmarketable, she did it herself. "I knew that people telling me girls can't play rock 'n' roll was just an absurdity, code words for a social statement which was `girls shouldn't play rock 'n' roll because girls can't be blatantly sexual,' " she fumes, forgetting about resting her voice. "I've kept a fire in my belly about it even still. I mean, Oprah has this promotion, `Women Who Rock,' and none of them are musicians! One thing I know, definitely know, is that I rock."
She hangs up her leather shorts and chain-link suspenders and shrugs into gym shorts and a sweatshirt. You can't, Ms. Jett notes, wear leather 24/7. A vegetarian, she says it's an excuse, "but a genuine one," that she takes her cues on wearing animal skins from Native Americans: revere the source. "When I'm at home, I just walk around naked: I had a terry cloth bathrobe, but I gave it to my cats," she says, revealing an irreverent grin and a show business rarity, teeth that have not been bleached to unnatural heights of white.
Ms. Jett abhors fake anything, even wrote a hit song about it ("Fake Friends"). She is an almost androgynous 117- pound toothpick with a few telltale muscles and curves and possesses, after a millennial New Year's Eve razor ritual witnessed only by two cats at her oceanfront abode in Long Beach, N.Y., the bald and vulnerable cranium of a newborn. Not that Ms. Jett thinks of herself as vulnerable. She cedes that quality to Liza Minnelli, whose performance in "Cabaret" is why Ms. Jett resolved to become a performer, too.
We are backstage at "Rocky Horror," where Ms. Jett, 40 but disinclined to say so, is celebrating her silver anniversary as rock's unrepentant ode to black leather, power chords and punkdom by taking six months off from her band, the BLACKHEARTS, for this Broadway debut. She was a semiregular at screenings of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" in 1975 when she formed her first band, JOAN JETT and the RUNAWAYS. Only a role in "Cabaret" could make for a more karmic return to the theater. (She did "Fiddler on the Roof" before dropping out of high school to tour with the RUNAWAYS.)
A CHUNKY Kiehl's musk-scented candle flickers on her makeup table, perfuming the dressing room she shares with a "Rent" alumna, Daphne Rubin- Vega. Benediction beams down from a kitschy plastic Crucifixion tableau enlivened by tiny red blinking lights. Her manager, KENNY LAGUNA, calls this Broadway experience "a Zen exercise." Ms. Jett terms it "a necessary challenge" and plans to reread Daniel Goleman's "Emotional Intelligence" to help her get through it. "In my Joan-Jett-and-the-BLACKHEARTS world, I'm the boss," she muses. "Here, I'm not, but I'm enjoying it. I can't imagine coming every day to the theater if you hated it — then you'd really have to act." She has a Greenwich Village apartment but prefers commuting to Long Beach, the ocean, her cats. This week, Mom is visiting. What, the JOAN JETT who wrenched her rotator cuff attending the Baltimore Orioles Baseball Fantasy Camp has a domestic side? "I love to cook, and I clean, I do laundry — sorry to burst the bubble, but I'm a regular old person." Well, not that regular. Last New Year's, Ms. Jett elected to defy her manager, and her fans, by shaving her head. (The last time she defied him like that, she turned down a Chrysler endorsement. True rockers, she says, "can't be bought." But about the head shaving.
"It was all about not letting the millennium pass like just another night; I wanted to take stock of my life, where I've been, where I'm going, to mark all that, and shaving my head was part of it. When I went blond, some people freaked out; when I shaved my head, everybody freaked out. I got letters from fans who said they'd never come to see me again. But I like that; it tweaks people. It challenges the perception that you are your hair." As in, you are a woman with no hair; therefore, you are negligible? "Exactly! I'm here to shake things up." Ms. Jett grew up in Pittsburgh and Erie, Pa., with supportive parents — Dad sold insurance. They did not mind that she fired her local guitar instructor after seeing a New York Dolls concert when she was 12. Archaeologist, astronaut, rock star: all her professional dreams were O.K. by them. "Except my father did make me take typing," she says. "Deep down, I don't think he expected I'd ever be much more than a secretary. But you know, it's come in handy. I can type fast."
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