Warren bounced enthusiastically up and down. “That?” she asked, to which Turner replied: “No.”

And so Turner rose, paused her retirement just long enough to correctly execute her signature move, and then collapsed laughing onto the couch, gleefully kicking her Louboutin flats into the air.

I asked her if it’s strange to watch these other women pretend to be her, and she said that she has spent her whole career watching other women pretend to be her.

She used to audition promising background singers for the Ike & Tina Turner Revue and say: “She’ll make a good Tina.” Later, when she started to see young pop starlets arise in her mold, she would look them over and say: “She’ll make a good Tina.” And when her record company told her that Beyoncé had released a song that referenced her — “Drunk in Love,” on which Jay-Z crudely boasts of his resemblance to Ike — Turner’s response was, “Yeah, I’m not surprised.”

It’s revisiting her life itself that is hard. The musical traces her triumphant rise as a solo artist and her budding romance with Bach, but first it tears through the 16 years she spent with Ike. She met him when he was a swaggering St. Louis bandleader and she was 17-year-old Anna Mae. He gave her a break as a performer, but by the end, he had almost made her hate music. He changed her name, and then he trademarked it, and then he owned her. He stole her earnings. He threw hot coffee in her face. He broke her jaw. Through it all he made her sing, even if blood was running down her throat.

It is difficult to neatly fictionalize that kind of physical and psychological violence. When Disney mounted “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” the 1993 biopic based on Turner’s life, Laurence Fishburne would not agree to play Ike until his “cardboard cutout” villain character was deepened. The climax of the stage musical shows Tina Turner triumphantly hitting Ike back before running to freedom; in real life, she did hit him back, but then she rubbed his temples until he fell asleep; only then did she feel safe enough to sneak away.

To this day, Turner has never revealed the full extent of his abuse. “I think I’m ashamed,” she said. “I feel I told enough.”

She first documented the violence in her 1986 book “I, Tina,” and it was then that her public persona began to evolve from popular singer to living legend. Suddenly, “You’re not just a star onstage with the hair and the legs,” she said. “You had a life. You had a tough life.” But once she had said it, she was forced to retell the story again and again. It felt like every time her friend Oprah interviewed her, she would ask, “Do you remember the first time Ike hit you?” When “What’s Love Got to Do With It” came out, Turner didn’t watch it. She didn’t need to relive that nightmare.