So generous are the performances in this West Coast premiere staging, and so savvy is Myler’s structuring of the action, that the actor-singer hug takes us all in. “Onstage I make love to 25,000 people,” Joplin once said. “Then I go home alone”. Both sides of the equation inform this propulsive show, which bonds the late singer to the audience with the emotive power of her concerts and the four albums she recorded before her death in 1970.

Myler’s “It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues”, his earlier Rep-to New York hit, surveyed blues history but landed nowhere long enough to pull us deeply into the real music. In “Love, Janis” writer/director Myler propels us right into the heart of Joplin’s raw genius. With actor Campbell speaking the text of Joplin’s letters and interviews, and singer Hart segueing out of the words into music, we see how Joplin transformed autobiography into art, white trying to keep her propensity for drugs and alcohol at bay.

A five-piece band, under the supervision of Sam Andrew from Joplin’s breakthrough group, Big Brother & the Holding Company, cooks behind Hart’s shockingly energetic performance. The music starts with the early soul-baring howling that made Joplin’s primitive blues so awesome. Then it moves seamlessly toward the more controlled and sophisticated fare of “Summertime”, and with her second band, the understated and touching, “Little Girl Blue.”

With the addition of Andy Elstob on trumpet and Charlie Rhythm on sax, the Rep quintet morphs into the Kozmic Blues Band and then the Full Tilt Boogie groups that backed Joplin on her last two albums and tours before her entirely preventable death at age 27.

For both band and singer, the unexpected high comes in “Summertime,” Andrew’s arrangement of the Gershwin standard from “Porgy and Bess.” The long, slow instrumental prelude –with solos and shared riffs for guitarists Kirk Cumming, Jon Nichols and bassist Kevin Cooper –and Hart’s vocal range and emotional fervor suggest what Joplin was becoming before she was found dead with fresh needle marks on her arms, in an L.A. motel room on Oct. 4, 1970.
Among the other surprises: Joplin’s ongoing attachment to her family back in Port Arthur, Texas; her savvy self-dramatizations with the media; her growing self-awareness, and wicked sense of humor.

Hart, who looks nothing like the fireplug signer, instead seems to be channeling her spirit, giving all her passion and pain in a highly physical performance that reveals the signer’s soul – a “Piece of My Heart” indeed.

Hart’s Joplin reminds that until the mid-sixties, feminism was a mere gleam in the eye of a few forward thinkers, and what Joplin calls the “cashmere sweater and girdle” stuff was still the way of the girl-world.

Just months before her death, Joplin mulls the real meaning of success. In missives home and journal entries, she compares herself unfavorably to her heroine, Aretha Franklin. And she vows to get better, to keep growing, to take piano lessons, deflect criticism (by Rolling Stone, especially) of her new direction, to become herself.

What Campbell tells, Hart shows. Only the stone-hearted could fail to be saddened that this celebrity went the way of Jimi Hendrix long before her potential prime.

In the end, Myler presents a full musical picture of the artist and a full enough psychological portrait of the ambitious and insecure young woman. Though her folk-rock chart topping hit “Me and Bobby McGee” was uncharacteristic of her blues style, the Kris Kristofferson lyric “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ else to lose” remains the right anthem by which to remember this iconic celebrity.

If you loved, as I did, those wonderful ancient rockers on the recent telethon – Paul Simon, Ringo, the sublime Neil Young on “Imagine” – you can get a dose of their era again in “Love, Janis.” Myler and company avoid the pitfalls of self-indulgent nostalgia, campy impersonation, and exploitative sentiment. Joplin truly lives again at the Rep in this affectionate and completely appealing “Love, Janis.”