In Love, Janis, it takes two and a half hours to cover just four years of Janis Joplin's life — yet the show never seems stretched beyond what the material offers. Lennon, on the other hand, covered 40 years in the same amount of time, and seemed thin.

Through her letters home to family in Port Arthur, Texas, and in dialogue excerpted from interviews, the musical now at Marines Memorial Theatre shows a life and career at warp speed. In the letters, Joplin reports on the continuing huge changes following her move to San Francisco in 1966 — and while it often seems like the events she is reporting should take a year or so to transpire, the letters are often just a month apart.

It's funny when an interviewer asks Joplin if she's intimidated about playing on a bill with already established stars at the Monterey Music Festival in 1967, and she retorts, "I've paid my dues." They've only been paid for a year, but in Joplin time, that's a chunk of eternity.

The greatest hits of Janis Joplin — and Love, Janis provides roaring recreations of them — are well known. Yet her life, to most, is seen mainly as a shooting star, with a few facts to place along its trajectory, before her death at age 27. What gives Love, Janis its impact are the private feelings she shares with family. True, she censored out matters of drugs and sex — as most of us would when writing home — but her deep longing for approval, especially from her mother, provides a fascinating contrast to the freewheeling public persona.

In her letters, Joplin gushes with love for San Francisco, so it's surprising that it's taken 11 years for the show to finally arrive here. Conceived and directed by Randal Myler, and inspired by Laura Joplin's book of her sister's letters, it premiered in Denver in 1995, and went on to have successful runs in Chicago and New York. Two of the stars of the latter two engagements are repeating their performances here, but you can only see one at a time.

Because of the vocal demands — and Joplin acknowledges her abuse of her voice in the show — Cathy Richardson and Katrina Chester perform at alternate performances. Richardson had the honors on opening night, and while that mysterious ingredient that turns a great singer into a star may be missing, it's still a powerful performance that finds increasing nuance as the accompanying story grows sadder. A seven-piece band is on stage, and provides solid support until undercutting the performers' curtain call with an indulgent jam.

While Richardson and Chester do occasionally speak, most of the talking is done by Morgan Hallett (who appears at all performances). Hallett does an excellent job of showing the needy daughter, the showboating star, and the increasingly unhappy celebrity who has the love of thousands every night, but can't find one person to love her as a woman. "I'm just a middle-aged chick with a loud voice and a drinking problem," she tells an interviewer shortly after her 25th birthday.

We do hear in the interviews Joplin talking about her unhappy high school days, but the letters reveal a back-story that can only be inferred. She makes repeated promises that she's not going to screw up again, that her self-destructive streak is under control. Our inclination is to support her in convincing her disapproving, narrow-minded family that great things are really happening for her now that she can blossom. The horrible irony is that Janis Joplin wound up confirming her family's fears with the ultimate screw-up.