Review: Million Dollar Quartet
Recording sessions have the mystique of making music history behind closed doors. No matter that the single most famous one in pop culture - the December day in 1956 when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins, now known as the Million Dollar Quartet, were all in the same Memphis studio - yielded nothing of great musical consequence.
Review: Million Dollar Quartet
Recording sessions have the mystique of making music history behind closed doors. No matter that the single most famous one in pop culture - the December day in 1956 when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins, now known as the Million Dollar Quartet, were all in the same Memphis studio - yielded nothing of great musical consequence.
It was lions at play, singing gospel and blues that the public didn't want to hear from them. But who wouldn't have wanted to be a fly on that wall?
No wonder this cultural artifact is the springboard of a jukebox musical, Million Dollar Quartet, which opened Tuesday at the Forrest Theatre, that's everything the original tapes were not - polished, artfully staged, and packaged for mass consumption though the innate funkiness of the music goes missing.
It's an oldies concert with a sketchy plot and quality assurance that comes with a Broadway pedigree. For anyone well-disposed toward 1950s rock-and-roll, the show (running through Dec. 16) is a fun evening that, to its credit, doesn't forget that these are four of the most wildly idiosyncratic talents ever to enjoy mainstream fame. But anyone who doesn't know the easily obtained original tapes should do themselves a favor and track them down (no pun intended).
The show's conceit: Sam Phillips, the hard-boiled Sun Records founder who is said to have discovered this fantastic four, is the narrator, surfing around plot currents that include the newly discovered Lewis tormenting tough-guy Perkins (then in a hit slump), who is mad at Presley for singing his signature song ("Blue Suede Shoes") on The Ed Sullivan Show. Presley has already moved on to RCA, is back for a visit, and is trying to take Phillips with him. Every song you'd want to hear from that period pops up at one time or another.
Director Eric Schaeffer skillfully guided the actors along that fine line between portrayal and impersonation. Though his voice is suitably deep, David Elkins doesn't come even close to capturing Johnny Cash, but he's an authentic presence, and that counts for everything. Martin Kaye is full of the backwoods weirdness that evolved into Lewis' high-energy outrageousness. As Perkins, Robert Britton Lyons convincingly portrays the arrogance that comes with newfound fame.
Cody Slaughter has the toughest and easiest assignment - Elvis, whose easily imitated physicality has also become as stylized as Kabuki. Slaughter even did The Scarf Ritual when Elvis threw his neck scarves into the audience - all executed deftly. Glimpses of inner character that you get from the others is absent with him. But having seen one of the last concerts by the real Elvis, my sense is that The King was like that, too.
Contact David Patrick Stearns at dstearns@phillynews.com.
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has written freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She serves on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, was a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop, a 2008 NEA/USC Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and twice was guest critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute. She received her B.A. from Bennington College and her M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and spends all her free time working out and driving people places. Follow her on Twitter @WendyRosenfield.
Jim Rutter has reviewed theater for The Inquirer since September, 2011. Since 2006, he covered dance, theater and opera for the Broad Street Review, and has also written for many suburban newspapers, including The Main Line Times. In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Fellowship in Arts Journalism. Thames & Hudson released his updated and revised version of Ballet and Modern Dance in June, 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he taught philosophy and logic at Drexel, and then Widener University. He also coaches Olympic Weightlifting for Liberty Barbell, and has competed at the national level in that sport since 2001.
