LONDON (CelebrityAccess) – Actress and singer Chanel Haynes alleges she was fired as the lead in the West End production of the musical Tina after being given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to perform with The Rolling Stones.
Haynes had been portraying the legendary Tina Turner in the musical based on her life, told Rolling Stone magazine that she was canned after agreeing to perform “Gimme Shelter” with the band.
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The show took place in Milan on June 21st and was the first Stones performance for frontman Mick Jagger since recovering from COVID-19. Haynes told the magazine she was flown with little notice from London to Milan to replace backup singer, Sasha Allen, who was unable to perform due to an unspecified reason.
“I can’t say exactly when I got the call because I don’t want to give timelines,” Haynes said. “But I’ll tell you that there was very little notice. Very little. Everybody was biting their nails. ‘How are we going to pull this off’ But I tell you the machine the Stones have is like Buckingham Palace or the White House. They have the same level of personnel. Next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Milan.”
“Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones did for me what he did for Tina Turner,” Haynes told CNN in a statement. “He shared his stage with me and exposed me to a new audience, and for that, I am eternally grateful.” Haynes posted on Instagram an email she said she later received from the Tina General Manager (GM) that informed her she had been suspended from the production.
“The theater will be informed that you are not permitted to enter,” the email reads. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Haynes declined to give specifics regarding her suspension but insisted it was because of her Rolling Stones performance, which occurred on a night that Tina was also occurring.
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Her “biggest heartbreak,” she said, was that friends and family, including a domestic violence survivor who helped her prepare for playing Turner, were flying in for what was to have been her final performance. Haynes missed the last three performances.
“She was my muse. She was the person that helped me properly tell that story from her perspective,” Haynes said. “I also wasn’t able to say goodbye to the children in the cast. That was hard.”
A rep for the production told Rolling Stone magazine in a statement: “This concerns an employee-related matter, and as a company policy, we do not comment on personnel-related individual cases.”
