'Million Dollar Quartet' on Broadway: Bright lights, but sound is still pure rock 'n' roll

Robert Britton Lyons as Carl Perkins, Levi Kreis as Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Clendening as Elvis Presley and Lance Guest as Johnny Cash in the Broadway production of "Million Dollar Quartet." The four lead rock 'n' rollers in New York formerly played at the Apollo Theater in Chicago | REVIEW from Nov. 2009.

Klieg lights are revealed. Spangled jackets descend from the flies. And “Million Dollar Quartet,” which has Gigi Pritzker as its lead producer, gets an audience-rousing finale that looks like it was inspired by the megamix at the end of “Mamma Mia.”

That’s Broadway for you. Folks are paying a lot of money and some of them like to know where that money went. But the finale is really about the music. And in this case, the money would have been far better spent on hiring a decent dramatic writer who could have added some subtlety and veracity to a crude book from Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux that still dispenses thudding anecdote, easy trivia and crude linkage instead of the live, credible, complex conversation of a quintet of icons of American rock ‘n’ roll.

The four stars of the Chicago show—Levi Kreis (Lewis), Lance Guest (Cash), Robert Britton Lyons (Perkins) and Eddie Clendening (Presley)—still deliver wholly stellar musical performances that (especially in terms of guitar work) go far, far beyond what Broadway audiences typically hear when actors pick up instruments.

And to the show’s credit, it still has not messed with the authenticity of the original sound. There are no extraneous horns nor strings nor artificial technical effects on “Matchbox” or “Folsom Prison Blues.” They are pretty much played the way Phillips, the other elephant in the room, recorded them. The expanded size of the house proves tricky for Clendening, who struggles with the Elvi’s upper-register. But other than that, the shows great at the Nederlander Theatre, long the home of “Rent,” especially when Guest is at the microphone or Kreis, a dazzling piano player, is on the keys. And that is thrilling for aficionados.

Phillips is now played by the sincere and appealing Hunter Foster, who handily deepens the character of the father of rock n’ roll by focusing on his uncertainty and insecurities rather than his post-facto achievements. Elizabeth Stanley, who plays Elvis’ girlfriend Dyanne, has a trickier task, since her character is based on non one specific.

Presley really did show up that night with a girl from Vegas. She appears in the famous group photo from that night near Christmas, 1956. That photo is used in the show—it has always been a turning point in the night. For the first hour, the crummy book holds back the audience. But once they are reminded this meeting really happened, they always seem to suddenly relax into the music and submit themselves to both its quality and cultural significance.

When “Million Dollar” first opened in Chicago, Elvis’ girl was in the photo. In later performances, and on Broadway, she has been cropped out. The Tribune unmasked Dyanne as the fromer Marilyn Evans, now Marilyn Knowles-Riehl. She’s the one in the photo. She seemed flattered by the inclusion. But the show, which has had more than its share of legal battles over likeness depictions and so on, never did the right thing by the historical record. And thus Stanley, a lively personality playing fiction among fact, substitutes a kind of generically brassy Broadway type for a woman who surely would have been much shyer. It never made dramatic sense.

The four singers aren’t about the drama, of course, except in terms of their personalities. They’re also hungry for New York, and at the performance I saw, some of their mutual admiration for each other was beginning to get in the way of the dramatic situation, which requires them to dance around each other warily. They were not all good friends.

That didn’t stop the music in 1956, and it doesn’t stop it now.

“Million Dollar Quartet” plays on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre, 208 W. 41st St. Call 877-250-2929 or visit MillionDollarQuartetLive.com. It also continues at the Apollo Theatre, 2540 N. Lincoln Ave. in Chicago. Call 773-935-6100.