BROADWAY ACROSS AMERICA: ‘MEMPHIS’
Nashville may be Music City, but there’s a second Tennessee town that could lay claim to the title. Rising over the Mississippi in the southwestern corner of the state, Memphis is the home of Beale Street blues, Stax Records and Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison all made rock-and-roll history.
Another epochal moment in popular music is the inspiration for the Broadway hit “Memphis,” 2010’s Tony Award winner for best musical, which visits ASU Gammage this week on its first national tour. When: Tuesday, March 5, through Sunday, March 10. Where: ASU Gammage, Mill Avenue and Apache Boulevard, Tempe.
Admission: $23.50 and up. Details: 480-965-3434, asugammage.com.
Set in the ’50s, the show is loosely based on the life of Dewey “Daddy-O” Phillips, one of the first White disc jockeys to play African-American artists on the radio.
In the stage version of the story, the deejay is Huey Calhoun, a musicloving misfit with a drawl as long and languid as the mighty Missip. Through a couple minor acts of sonic sabotage, he lands a job on a Memphis radio station and proceeds to rattle the racist social structure by playing blues, soul, R&B and gospel records for his White audience. To add to the drama, he also falls in love with a young Black singer, Felicia Farrell, which doesn’t go over well on either side of the skin-color divide.
Part of the fun of “Memphis” is that, at a time when Broadway routinely recycles old hits into blockbusters, this show only seems like a jukebox musical. The songs sound vintage, but they were actually written for the show by David Bryan — keyboard player for the rock band Bon Jovi — with lyrical help from book writer Joe DiPietro (“All Shook Up,” “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”).
“There’s something familiar-sounding about it,” says Bryan Fenkart, who plays Huey on the national tour after serving as standby to the Tony-nominated Chad Kimball on Broadway. “It feels like you can leave humming and tapping your feet to the music as if you’d heard it before, but you haven’t.”
The score, which garnered another of the show’s four Tonys, runs the gamut of what was at the time marginalized as “race music,” from the faux-Motown “Someday” and the rollicking jumpblues of “Ain’t Nothin’ but a Kiss” to the Sam Cooke-smooth “The Music of My Soul” and the organ-drenched gospel of “Say a Prayer.”
There’s a word for this kind of artistic homage: pastiche. And it’s not the kind of thing that gets the full-throated praise of the cognoscenti, regardless of awards or box office.
“It is a vehicle for vocal talent and an exceptional re-creation of the music it emulates,” Valley actor and director Tim Shawver, a huge Broadway buff, says of “Memphis.”
“The score was more than enjoyable, but it felt like a really great cover version of a song that didn’t need to be covered.”
But Felicia Boswell, who plays Huey’s love interest on the tour, thinks there’s more to the music than that.
“We do have a lot of songs (that sound like they’re) from that period, like the Wailin’ Joe song ‘Scratch My Itch,’ and then the ‘Someday’ song, which is very Supremesesque, Diana Ross-esque,” Boswell says. “But then I love that the music is written also for audiences now, where it’s an extension of what the characters want to say and the music takes you through their personal journeys. So I think that (David Bryan) is brilliant when it comes to that, the way that he was able to weave that in with some of the traditional sounds of that day.”
Boswell also starred in the national tour of “Dreamgirls,” playing the Diana Ross-inspired character Deena, so this is not her first period pastiche. But “Memphis” means more to her.
“There are lots of parallels between Felicia Farrell and Felicia Boswell,” she says. “She’s from the South; I’m from Montgomery, Alabama, the heart of Civil Rights movement. Rosa Parks is my cousin, and I’ve always dated outside of my race. I grew up singing gospel music, and I’ve always wanted to share my gift with the world. So we have very similar passions, Felicia Farrell and I. ...
“Just like ‘Dreamgirls’ and ‘Hairspray,’ our show is similar in terms of showing how difficult it was to get into the business in that day and time. But I love that our show transcends that, and that we go to those ugly places where other shows were afraid to go. We have that extra edge. We go a few steps forward in telling that story.”
Although “edgy” is not an adjective often attributed to “Memphis,” it does go further than “Dreamgirls” or “Hairspray” in depicting the sometimes violent extremes of racism in pre- Civil Rights America. Citing today’s same-sexmarriage battle, Boswell and Fenkart agree that a story about love breaking down social barriers is every bit as relevant now as it would have been half a century ago.
“Sometimes the boat needs to be rocked,” Fenkart says.