Shows

(A review of “The Janis Papers”, written, directed, and performed by Jan Kudelka at the Lakeview Center in Anglemont, BC Sunday, January 17, 2025)

Jan enters stage center, and immediately, the energy jolts the room. The audience holds its breath. Something is happening here. Something is about to happen. A shift is taking place, a portal opening to a place where time itself disappears, where life and death are entangled in embrace. This is what it feels like to be present at “The Janis Papers”, Jan Kudelka’s creative love child with the posthumous Joplin. When Jan enters stage, she commands us to surrender our reality, stuns us into losing all sense of time and place.

The legendary Joplin, pronounced dead in Los Angeles in 1970 and mourned infinitely by the collective, comes to life in 2025 - making her mercurial appearance at the Lakeview Center in Anglemont, B.C. a safe outpost from the fiery city of Angels and its Hollywood machinations. This might not be so surprising when we later learn that Janis may indeed have faked her own death and moved to Canada, disappearing herself, to get away from it all.

Either way, she is here, now. A littler older, a little more comfortable in her skin, wiser, more seasoned, sharp, cutting and captivating…

It’s hard to know where Jan Kudelka exits and Janis Joplin enters…and vice versa.

The entire show, reflected in Jan’s deliberate and well-choreographed, impressive physical performance, is fluid, shimmering, reality bending, and time contorting.

One minute we are with Jan, as a young girl in awe hearing Joplin for the first time … and the next we witness Joplin, revealing never before told secrets of her soul through story and song. The era comes to life with the coloured bohemian fabrics hanging behind Kudelka, with the costumes she wears, with the language, the attitude and snarls that break into songs we know and love.

The music, beautifully assembled and performed, is pre-recorded by amazing local talents, John Treichel and predominantly Liam McIvor Tyner, whom Jan proudly reveals she held as a baby.

All the while the “Road Warrior” Jan’s roadie extraordinaire, sporting an eye catching original painted black leather jacket, groovily hovers round the stage pressing keys on the computer as Jan initiates each song emerging in the story of Janis.

Kudelka’s voice, her enunciation, her ability to inhabit the lyrics, and transcribe emotions, is truly the heart of the show.

As I sat there, transported by the story, by the music and by the show, it felt as if I was surfing a sea of emotions. Raw, anguished and tender emotions birthed to life by Joplin some 60 odd years ago, resurfacing now, in that same ocean in the shape and form of Kudelka. In a surrounding that all but disappears, Kudelka distills the essence of Janis, revealing to the audience for a suspended moment in time what may be the ultimate magic feat performed by Janis. She has pulled it off, ladies and gentlemen…JANIS LIVES!

(the “Janis Papers” was met with a spontaneous standing ovation… Catch Jan Kudelka next at a performance of Circus Gothic at the Lakeview Center January 25, 2025)