Sophia Ramos belts it out as Janis Joplin in "Love, Janis."

Photo by Tim Fuller / Courtesy of Arizona Theatre Company, Photo illustration by Sara Stewart / Arizona Daily Star

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Janis Joplin lives.

Oh sure, she died in 1970 of a drug overdose.

But see Arizona Theatre Company's "Love, Janis," and you'll understand that that voice, that soul, that passion can't be buried away.

Joplin wrapped her vocal chords and her heart around a song. Her phrasing, her feeling, her husky-with-cigarettes-and-whiskey voice breathed hard-lived life into a song.

And so do the two women who play the singing Janis in this full-blown concert and play.

This is a piece you want to see at least twice; once with Cathy Richardson, the other with Sophia Ramos.

They alternate in the role — being Janis Joplin can wreak havoc on the voice. Since they have a day of rest between performances, both women seem to give it their all, unleashing voices that rip your heart and whip your soul.

Neither looks like Joplin, and they don't even sound like her.

But what they both had was the rawness, the energy, the reach-down-and-pull-out the passion to give throbbing pulse to Joplin's gritty, bluesy tunes.

At Saturday's opening-night performance, Richardson — who played the role in the off-Broadway hit — immediately owned the crowd as she whipped into the opening number, "Piece of My Heart," and it wasn't long after that that she stunned the sold-out Temple of Music and Art audience with "Down on Me."

But it was the first-act closer, "Ball and Chain," the song that launched Joplin into stardom at the Monterey Pop Festival, that clinched Richardson as the Janis incarnate.

In Sunday night's performance — again to a sold-out crowd — Ramos nailed the early songs, but was a touch slower in working up the heat. By the time "Summertime" came along late in the first act, however, she was burning. Her rendition of the classic George and Ira Gershwin song echoed Joplin's deeply felt version. Then Ramos — who has played with a slew of greats, including Joplin's band Big Brother and the Holding Company — launched into "Ball and Chain." She made the audience understand what the blues were with a version that stunned them into silence, then pushed them into raucous applause.

While this is a solid concert — 17 full-length tunes to keep the mostly aging boomer audience going wild — it also is a touching play that reveals a side of Joplin that few would have guessed.

It's hard to imagine this rock 'n' roller cooing over a dog, mooning over George Harrison, requesting a "good, all-around cookbook" for Christmas, or bending over backward to try to please her parents.

The play is based on the book "Love, Janis," by Joplin's sister, Laura. All the dialogue — given verve, sass and earnest hope by the talking Janis, Marisa Ryan — is taken from her letters to her family in Port Arthur, Texas, and interviews she conducted while she was climbing the fame ladder.

Her letters home showed a woman with a tough facade hiding a girlish longing. They also showed a woman who read voraciously and had a keen sense of humor and a way with words.

"She showed me the air and taught me how to fill it," Joplin said of the great blues woman Bessie Smith.

"There's an awfully good chance I'm not going to blow it this time," she writes to her mother, almost pleading with her to have faith in her one more time.

"I'm almost sold on becoming a poor man's Cher," she writes to her family in another letter early in her career.

"Love, Janis" gives us a sense of who the woman was behind the singer with the desperate, dangerous, divine delivery.

The use of two actors to portray Joplin in the play — the singing and the talking Janis — is an effective ploy by Randal Myler, who conceived, adapted and directed this gem. It gives us a definitive delineation between the public and the private Janis, allowing us to appreciate both of them and to see her inner conflicts. But in the end, a simple wrapping of one Janis around the other makes it clear they are the same.

Richardson and Ramos are backed by a band that would be the envy of any big-time rock 'n' roller.

The whole group was tight and together, but Joel Hoekstra on lead guitar was especially electrifying, and Eric Massimino on bass and Jim Wall on drums were mesmerizing. Tucson's Lisa Otey ripped up the keyboards with a bluesy command.

"Love, Janis" is a boomers' dreamy flashback. But it reaches out to a broader audience than that. Young teens were spotted throughout the Temple of Music and Art both nights, moving freely and clearly getting what made Joplin and her music so magical and so essential.

"Love, Janis" is proof that Joplin, her heart, her blues, won't die.