Paying homage to the Million Dollar Quartet
The momentous 1956 jam session that featured Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash captured brilliantly
Ashley Carruthers as Jerry Lee Lewis alternately tinkled, caressed and pounded the piano into submission, in a sassy, give-’em-hell style of performance in this homage to the day in December 1956 when the quartet of the title – Lewis, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash – came together for the first and last time in Sam Phillips’s Sun studio in Memphis.
Wisely, the four main performers, singing and playing their own instruments, avoided trying to impersonate the four greats but caught their individual styles. Ross William Wild was as near the mark as you could ask in his Elvis the Pelvis routines.
The first half was a slow warm-up but afterwards the highly talented singer/musicians, along with an equally talented drummer and bass player, let rip with a jam session to bring the house down, giving uninhibited renditions of great rock and soul classics such as Long Tall Sally, Walk the Line, Peace In The Valley and Hound Dog.
The dramatic aspects were generally heavy-handed but they did the job of filling in historic and personal background for the studio and the four legendary performers, with Jason Donovan as Sam Phillips narrating and acting, in a role that didn’t give him much scope.
The unlikely contract niceties were obviously shoe-horned in to give a little dramatic punch to the story. The Perkins/Lewis antipathy didn’t make sense on the day but it all gave Carruthers a chance to create a feisty character for the mercurial Lewis and allowed Perkins (Matt Wycliffe) to snarl over Elvis getting all the credit for the Perkins’s song Blue Suede Shoes. The history didn’t go on to record Lewis’s fall from grace when it was discovered he had married his 13-year-old cousin. It’s a story that somehow fits with the rockabilly persona.
The show doesn’t stand up as a genuine musical but it would be
Million Dollar Quartet BordGáis Theatre R an until February 25 ‘Let rip with an uninhibited jam session to bring the house down’
churlish not to acknowledge the energy and skills of the six-man ensemble. It was obvious that the audience had come to wallow in such roof-rattling classics as Great Balls of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On and they weren’t left wanting.