Talk about catching the zeitgeist.

Janis Joplin, blues singer from Port Arthur, Texas, hopped on the hard-rocking, free-loving, drug-fueled zeitgeist of the '60s and rode that rocket to the stars.

Within a matter of months of her arrival in San Francisco in 1966, She got moving so fast and so high that she became the scene. But what zooms up must crash, and she was dead of an overdose - as was Jimi Hendrix immediately before her - in 1970 at again

That blazing arc, with all its innocence and supersonic speed and inevitable wreckage, makes "Love, Janis" a rock-'n'-rolling good time, a snapshot of an era and a portrait of an artist caught up in her own myth.

That myth, and Joplin's screaming, fire-eating brand of blues-rock vocals, still packs visceral, youth-hypnotizing power, as was evidenced at Thursday's opening of " Love, Janis" at Playhouse Square's Hanna Theatre.

Sitting in the middle of the Hanna, two 25-year-old women, in pleasant blouses and hippie bangles, sang every word of every on of the 18 songs in the show that Joplin indelibly imprinted on her times.

And they sat with rapt attention as a less-publicized, more little-girlish Joplin emerged through the reading of letters she wrote home to her parents and contemporary interviews.

Conceived and directed by Randal Myler, "Love, Janis" ingeniously uses two actresses, one who wails onstage and another who speaks intimately with us.

First seen hereabouts in 1999 in a developmental production at the Cleveland Playhouse, "Love, Janis is back in a streamlined production that mixes performers from the subsequent off-Broadway production with Cleveland's homegrown talent.

In the vocal chord-shredding "singing Janis" role, touring rock singer Katrina Chester throws every molecule of her slinky being into "Piece of My Heart" (Joplin's version of which might be the greatest rock vocal performance of all time), "Summertime" and "Get it While You Can."

And she leads the audience in two audience participation renditions of Joplin's most famous numbers, the playfully materialistic "Mercedes Benz" and "Me and Bobby McGee" and enduring freedom anthem.

She doesn't even try to imitate Joplin (who could?), but instead evokes Janis while making each song her own.

(Chester and Cincinnati-based Lauren Dragon will alternate performances singing Janis for a month; then the role will be taken over by Cleveland blues singer Mary Bridget Davies. Chester floored me, but I plan on going back to check out the other two.)

As explosively entertaining as the singing is, slim, New York-based actress Morgan Hallett's cuddly, kittenish "Talking Janis" is even more engrossing, drawing us into Joplin's inner world.

The third star is the band, assembled by Sam Andrew (original member of Joplin's first two groups), especially guitar-thrashing Joel Hoekstra and big-bang drummer Bill Ransom. (And, by the way, that's Cleveland's Kristine Jackson, Davies' sometimes-collaborator, on trumpet.

In a word, "Love, Janis" rocks. But it also captures the soul of the young woman who captured - and was captured - by the zeitgeist of an era.