Joni Mitchell: Take Me As I Am
Written and Performed by Rainee Blake
Soho Playhouse | 15 Vandam Street, New York, NY 10013
October 10 - November 2, 2025
In the dusky underbelly of the SoHo Playhouse—one of those half-forgotten basements that hum faintly with the ghosts of cigarette smoke and jazz standards—an audience sits in half-shadow. The crowd murmurs with the quiet expectancy of those who sense they are about to witness something rare. Sharing half the space with the actual bar, on the low stage—a raised platform really, modestly defiant in its elevation—sits a woman. Barefoot, and a mass of stunning sunflower blonde hair. A wisp of a figure draped in the folds of a long dress that gathers delicately at her ankles. She is tuning a guitar, and she is taking her time about it. The audience, lulled by the ritual, submits gladly to her unhurried pace. There is, in the act of tuning, already a kind of performance. She laughs, barely audible, a secret sound. One suspects she’s communing with something beyond the room—a private frequency, a self-contained world vibrating just out of reach. And then, with a flicker of light and a single resonant chord, she begins to sing.
The air changes. It’s as if someone has thrown open a window to Laurel Canyon in 1971. Her voice—clear yet honey-warm, disciplined yet open—is both invocation and resurrection. You could swear it’s her, that holy troubadour of introspection and open tunings: Joni Mitchell.
But it isn’t. It is Rainee Blake, the Australian-born actor, musician, and writer whose one-woman show Take Me As I Am achieves the kind of alchemy that lesser performers only dream of. Blake does not play Joni Mitchell so much as she channels her—inviting her spirit to flicker through the room like a candle in draft. The conceit of the show is simple yet piercingly effective: it is 1976, and Mitchell is returning to the stage after a solitary cross-country road trip. A year of self-exile and rediscovery. The audience—this one in New York City—is gently reminded, through a cheeky aside, that they are, in fact, meant to be in California. “Boy, it sure is nice to be back in California,” Blake-as-Joni teases, and the line lands with a ripple of laughter and surrender.
Any lingering geographical defensiveness evaporates the moment she begins to sing again. Over the next hour, she moves effortlessly through Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic songbook—eight albums’ worth of stories distilled into a single performance. “California,” “A Case of You,” “Woodstock”—the greatest hits are there, but so too are the deeper cuts, the ones that belong to the faithful. So over the course of a leisurely played setlist, there’s also the transporting “Cactus Tree,” “Both Sides Now” that comes with the invitation to sing along, the seminal “Help Me” from Court and Spark, “Carey” from Blue, “Coyote” with its knowing references to a brief affair with Sam Shepard, and of course, a request from this critic, “Free Man in Paris.”
Between songs, Blake-as-Joni drifts into monologue, or perhaps confession. She speaks of touring with Bob Dylan with bemused detachment, of polio and loneliness and the peculiar ache of womanhood in an age of masculine mythmaking. These interludes—delivered with an authenticity that never slides into mimicry—transform what might have been a simple tribute concert into a fully realized portrait of an artist’s psyche.
Rainee Blake does not merely sing Joni Mitchell—she inhabits her, body and soul, with the kind of total immersion that renders the boundaries between impersonation and incarnation deliciously irrelevant. She does not portray Mitchell so much as invite us into her living room, as if we’ve wandered in after a long tour to find her cross-legged on the floor, cigarette in hand, ready to unspool a few well-worn tales.
There is a wry, conspiratorial glint in Blake’s eye as she speaks—a knowing humour that slips easily between irony and sincerity. She teases her audience with a gentle mischief, punctuating her recollections with laughter that feels at once spontaneous and deeply lived-in. Each anecdote lands with the effortless intimacy of a secret half-confessed, as though we are not spectators but confidants, folded into the soft glow of her recollection.
The evening builds, inevitably, toward “Little Green.” Blake introduces it with a hush that feels almost sacred, recounting Mitchell’s decision to give up her daughter for adoption—a revelation both devastating and essential to understanding the depth of Mitchell’s art. The song, when it comes, is less performed than released. One feels the audience collectively lean forward, suspended in the tender cruelty of it all.
In the grand architecture of Take Me As I Am, the emotional keystone rests upon a single, devastating premise: the artist’s sacrifice of the personal at the altar of the creative. It is this act of renunciation—this conscious relinquishing of ordinary intimacy in pursuit of the sublime—that forms the true marrow of the performance. Beneath the honeyed melodies and nostalgic reverence for a bygone era hums a quieter, more existential tension: what must a woman surrender to claim authorship of her own life? Blake makes this the axis on which her entire portrayal turns. It is not fame, nor romance, nor even musical mastery that defines her Joni, but rather the unbearable calculus of devotion—what is forfeited in exchange for freedom. And indeed, that tension—the tug-of-war between creation and connection, between solitude and validation—is what hums beneath every note.
Blake wrote Take Me As I Am at twenty-three. Now, at thirty-three, she performs it with a kind of weathered grace, the sort that can only come from living a little, losing a little. Her understanding of Mitchell—no longer purely devotional—is textured now, a blend of awe and kinship. There is humor here, yes, but also truth. Both women—Mitchell and Blake—share a fierce independence, a refusal to rush, a defiant willingness to take up space.
In our current cultural moment—where virality is mistaken for value, and speed for significance—that act of taking one’s time feels nothing short of radical. Watching Blake, one is struck by the serenity of it: her refusal to hurry, to pander, to overexplain. Like Mitchell before her, she occupies the stage with the quiet authority of someone who knows that art worth making must first belong to oneself.
What distinguishes Take Me As I Am from the endless parade of tribute acts and nostalgia circuits is precisely this: Blake’s performance is not an imitation but a transfiguration. Her Joni is not a museum piece, preserved in amber, but a living, breathing presence—full of contradiction, humor, ache, and radiance. She nails the Canadian lilt, the laugh that lilts at the end of a line like sunlight breaking through cloud, the subtle choreography of switching between guitar and dulcimer. Yet what makes her performance extraordinary is what lies beneath those surfaces: a deep and compassionate understanding of Mitchell’s ethos. This is not homage. It is invocation.
And so, in that dim SoHo basement—beneath the lights and the clink of half-empty glasses—something extraordinary happens. Rainee Blake becomes Joni Mitchell, yes. But more than that, she becomes every woman who has ever tried to balance her art with her heart, her freedom with her fear, her solitude with her need to be seen. By the end of the night, the distinction between actor and icon dissolves entirely. What remains is the music, the light, and the ineffable sense that something—someone—has been truly, beautifully conjured.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on October 27, 2025. All rights reserved.