Background
I saw this stage play at Silco Theatre on July 5th while I was visiting my parents up in Colorado. I've been behind on posting my vacation related stuff, so I'm just posting this now.
I had never heard of this play before, but my dad (who had already seen it once) suggested we go together. He thought it would be a good outing since both of us were interested in old rock and roll music.
Never having heard of this play before, I was completely unfamiliar with the premise. But the premise is based on a fascinating piece of rock and roll trivia. You can read all about it on Wikipedia here. To quote from some of that Wikipedia article:
"Million Dollar Quartet" is a recording of an impromptu jam session involving Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash made on December 4, 1956 at the Sun Record Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. An article about the session was published in the Memphis Press-Scimitar under the title "Million Dollar Quartet". The recording was first released in Europe in 1981 as The Million Dollar Quartet with 17 tracks. A few years later more tracks were discovered and released as The Complete Million Dollar Session. In 1990, the recordings were released in the United States as Elvis Presley: The Million Dollar Quartet. This session is considered a seminal moment in rock and roll.
...go ahead and read the rest of that Wikipedia article. It's fascinating stuff if you're interested in music history.
And you can also listen to these songs on Youtube.
The stage play, Million Dollar Quartet, is a dramatization of that infamous recording session that first opened on Broadway in 2010. Again, you can read all about it on Wikipedia here. It's what is known as a Jukebox Musical--"a stage musical whose songs are already well known in popular music, rather than part of an original score."
The Review
The appeal of this premise is obvious--Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash all in one room! Who wouldn't want to be in that room and listen to the music that they produce? (*1)
But then, the problem with this premise is equally obvious. It's not really Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. It's just actors portraying them. So who cares what jam session is produced by 4 actors.
And yet, the cast is talented enough, and do such a good job of portraying their respective characters, that pretty soon you start to buy into it. Those men up on the stage really do seem to be Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins.
Obviously a lot of this is dependent on the talent of whatever local production you happen to see. But I think the cast at Silco Theatre in Colorado pulled it off.
The playlist of the stage musical appears to be much different than the playlist of the real 1956 session. According to Wikipedia, the actual session "consisted largely of snippets of gospel songs that the four artists had all grown up singing."
In the stage musical, they're mostly leaning into renditions of their greatest hits (Blue Suede Shoes, Walk the Line, Great Balls of Fire, etc.) But there are a couple songs that are in both the real event and stage musical (Peace in the Valley, Down by the Riverside, etc).
But despite the playlist of the stage musical not being 100% historically accurate, the actors throw themselves into the songs with such enthusiasm that it really is a riveting performance.
Sure, you're essentially just watching a cover band. But it's a good cover band.
As you might expect off of a stage play that is based off of a studio recording session, the play is mostly just songs. It's almost like just being at a concert. And yet, there is a little bit of dialogue and plot to hold the thing together.
There are various plotlines and arcs. Carl Perkins is annoyed by the new kid, Jerry Lee Lewis. Elvis is struggling to navigate the pressures of stardom. Carl Perkins is upset that Elvis Presley stole his song Blue Suede Shoes. Etc.
Arguably the main character of the stage play is Sam Phillips, founder and owner of Sun Records, who is struggling to manage his little record company, and hang on to his star musicians, in the face of competition from RCA and Colombia.
I'm going to assume that while perhaps some of this conflicts may have been true historically, these things didn't actually come up at the actual Million Dollar Quartet recording session. (Certainly the Wikipedia article gives no indication). But you expect a stage play like this to take some liberties.
Other Notes
Wikipedia Rabbit Holes
As you've probably noticed already, from the frequent use of Wikipedia links, there's any number of Wikipedia Rabbit Holes you can fall down in the course of researching more about the historical inspiration for this musical.
Who was this Sam Phillips guy? Whatever happened to Sun Records? Not to mention reading all about the Million Dollar Quartet itself. (Lots of interesting stuff is in that Wikipedia article.) And then there's researching and confirming all the different biographical tidbits about the 4 mains themselves that the musical throws out. (Carl Perkins traffic accident, Elvis getting booed at Vegas, etc). And I will confess that after seeing this play, I went down several of those Wikipedia Rabbit Holes, and learned a lot of interesting things. But rather than trying to recount it all here on this blog post, I'll just invite you, dear reader, to have some fun going down your own Wikipedia Rabbit Holes, if you are so inclined.
An Elderly Audience
The audience at the showing I went to was an older crowd. I think I was one of the few people present who was under 70. Several of them needed assistance walking. There was a bit of excitement right before the show when one old woman lost her footing and fell to the ground as she was walking down the aisle to her seat. (Several people had to help her up. She ended up being alright.)
Now, some of this may be because these days older people tend to patronize the theater much more than younger people just in general.
But it's also not hard to imagine that the nostalgia for the 1950s music was a big factor in bringing out this older crowd.
There was a prologue to the play in which an announcer talked about how this music was considered dangerous and rebellious back in its day, and how a lot of adults disapproved of the music. The old people in the audience laughed knowingly, and several of them laughed and raised their hands when the announcer asked if any of them had listened to rock music that their parents had disapproved of. The old guy sitting in front of me yelled out that he had been corrupted by rock music.
Later, in the show, most of them were out of their seats dancing along to the songs.
It made me think about what a funny thing aging can be. Here were a bunch of old people who are at the point in their lives when they should be authority figures to younger people. (And no doubt most of them are.) And yet, somewhere inside them, they are still the rebellious 15 year-old who listens to the rock and roll music that their parents disapproved of.
(But I shouldn't be talking about these "old people" as if they are a different species from myself. At this point, I'm only a couple years shy of 50, and I have quite a few gray hairs on my head.)
The Sound of the Music
I suspect I'm not the first person to notice this, but 1950s music can be a strange thing to pin down. When you listen to it on the radio, it sounds really tame. It seems sometimes difficult to imagine that there was ever a time when this music could have appealed to teenagers.
But then, when you listen to recreations of 1950s music, it often has a hard edge and an energy that the original seems to lack. Compare, for instance, the original Great Balls of Fire song with the recreation of that same song from the 1989 movie. The movie version kind of sounds more exciting, right?
Or for another example, take the 1994 Beatles Biopic Backbeat. The movie versions of all of those songs are much more raw and energetic than the original Beatles versions. And it's not just your imagination. According to Wikipedia,
Due to the film's focus on the early days of the band, the soundtrack includes no songs written by members of the Beatles but various songs the group performed in Hamburg, written and recorded by other artists. In this respect, rather than re-create the sounds of the period, iconoclastic, rebellious musicians were recruited (as a producer noted, the Beatles' pre-recording stage act was "the punk of its day") to better convey the way the music was appreciated by audiences of the time.
I guess the point is that often covers of old 1950s (and early 1960s) songs make these songs sound a lot more hardcore than the original.
And so it seemed to me with the play Million Dollar Quartet. It seemed that their renditions of the 1950s songs were a lot more rocking than the original songs themselves.
I discussed this with my dad on the drive back, whether or not the original songs sounded as rocking as the stage play made them sound. My dad pointed out to me that the original songs were often hampered because they were only recorded in mono, and so the sound couldn't really come alive the way that later songs did.
I don't know--let me know what you think in the comments. Were 1950s songs just a bit tamer than modern music? Or was the rawness and energy of the original performance smothered by the recording technology of the time?
Footnotes
(*1) Although as a sidenote, I have to say that historically, collaborations between famous musicians are often disappointing.
The Bleeding Heart album (the collaboration between Hendrix and Jim Morrison) was awful.
The Dylan & the Dead album was disappointing.
I'm not a big fan of The Traveling Wilburys (although granted some people like them.)
The John Lennon and Chuck Berry collaboration was nothing special.
And, not to get too far ahead of my review, but if you listen to the actual tracks produced by the real Million Dollar Quartet, it's nothing special, is it? I mean, the idea of these 4 guys all in a room together is really cool. But the actual music produced is hardly valuable in and of itself.
I guess the lesson is that just because a bunch of musicians are individually successful as solo artists, it doesn't mean they're going to mesh well with each other in a group.
But am I overlooking a collaboration that was actually great? Let me know in the comments.
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