ST. LOUIS — It was a pilgrimage of sorts. The cast of "Tina - The Tina Turner Musical" met with arts students at Sumner High School Friday afternoon.
Tina graduated from Sumner in 1958.
"I'm in awe right now," Tina actress Ari Groover told 5 On Your Side.
The show has two Tinas. Sister Tina actress Parris Lewis added, "It's a great honor and a blessing to be able to walk the halls of Tina's humble beginnings. When she moved to St. Louis, this is probably one of the first places she ended up. And to know this is where she got her start while she was probably creeping in the streets with her older sister, she was coming back to Sumner High to go to school."
The current students of Sumner performed for the cast. Who knows, maybe the next Tina is in the choir.
Lewis said it's possible: "As long as you've got the work ethic and the drive and the talent, it's not always about where you come from, but it's about how we are preparing ourselves for where we want to go."
The two actresses told 5 On Your Side, that the path to Broadway isn't blazed in theater classes.
"I may have done it on Broadway," Groover said, "but I never expected to do this, to be honest. She was an opera singer and I went to school for visual arts, I did not see myself doing musical theater."
The cast and Sumner students were joined by a few alumni. In the audience Friday was Vera Vincent Smith, known to her classmates as Vera Carter Smith.
"I had gym with Annie," Smith said in reference to Turner. The performer's birth name was Anna Mae Bullock and that's how Smith knew her. "It was always something that we looked forward to because she was a lot of fun."
Tina, or Anna Mae, graduated one year before Smith in 1958.