Million Dollar Quartet: Review of a Stage Play

(Stage Play Review)

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.

Wizard of Oz Ballet by the Grand Rapids Ballet School Junior Company: Review

(Theater--Land of Oz)

My wife got the ballet tickets from the neighbor.  (The neighbor had 4 tickets to the ballet, but was too busy to go herself.)

"Do you want to take the kids to the ballet?" my wife asked me.

"I don't need to see the ballet," I responded.

I do have as a long term goal to try to culture myself (see, for example, my Blogging the Canon project), but I haven't yet worked my way up to the age of classical ballet.  And at the moment, I lack all appreciation for it. I enjoy a good stage play, but 90 minutes of dancing with no dialogue?  That didn't sound fun to me at all.

"We should go, it will be fun for the kids," my wife said.

So, we went.

This was done by the Grand Rapids Ballet.  More info on this production is on their website HERE.

The ballet started with a short introduction by the choreographer.  Based on his introduction, it sounded like he had also been responsible for writing and creating this ballet, but it wasn't entirely clear.  Is this ballet entirely locally created?

One interesting tidbit I got from the introduction was that Frank L. Baum had spent time in West Michigan, and that portions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz were apparently written while Frank L. Baum was staying in Holland, Michigan.  Wow! I had no idea.

The choreographer also said that the ballet was based more on the book than the movie.  Although in my opinion, the ballet seemed to be also heavily influenced by the movie. The music was often just riffs on the songs from movie, and the ending implied the whole thing was just a dream--something that was true in the movie, but not the book.

Nor was the violence from the book reproduced in this ballet.  I suppose that's for the best.  But I kept waiting for the Tin Woodman to use his ax (as he often did in the book), but it never happened.  

Occasionally this produced gaps.  For example, in the ballet, the characters are saved from the poppy flowers by the mice (as was true in the book--in the movie they were saved by Glinda).  However, the ballet omitted the scene where the Tin Woodman saved the queen of the mice from the wild cat.  So it doesn't make any sense for the mice to save them in the ballet version.

But then, is a ballet even supposed to make sense?  My wife, being Vietnamese, actually did not know the story of The Wizard of Oz, and only had a vague idea of what was supposed to be going on from watching the ballet.  Because the ballet was told only in dancing, and with no dialogue, the ballet kind of assumed that you know the general story of The Wizard of Oz, and didn't work too hard to make the story completely comprehensible to the uninitiated.  (e.g. When the Scarecrow gestured to his head, I knew that he was indicating that he wanted a brain, because I was already familiar with the story, but this wasn't at all clear to my wife.)  Perhaps that's true of all ballet adaptations?  I don't know.  This was the first full length ballet I ever saw.  (Not counting televised versions of The Nutcracker.)

From a technical standpoint, the ballet was excellent.  (I mean, take my opinion with a grain of salt, because this was the first and only full ballet I ever saw. But it all looked great to me.) The dancers were all incredibly talented and coordinated, they did all their leaps and jumps well.  It was impressive to behold.

Impressive, but... well, if you're not a ballet fan, then watching 90 minutes of just dancing can be a bit tiresome.

And, as someone who never really got into ballet, I've got to say: what's with all the dancing on the toes?  Who decided that ballet dancers always have to be dancing on their tip-toes?  Doesn't that cause all sorts of joint damage?  Can't they just dance like normal?

But, that's not to say there weren't highlights.  There were a few upbeat jazzy numbers that were fun.  The Wicked Witch did an excellent job, and final confrontation with her was suitably intense, both in terms of the music that accompanied it, and in terms of the acting.

When everyone returned to the Emerald City, there was then a really upbeat number that (in my humble opinion) should have closed out the performance.  But after this, we got a couple slower numbers as Dorothy makes her way back home.  (Or slowly awakens from a dream.  It's a little bit unclear what is happening at the end.)  My kids got very restless during these last couple of numbers.

Still, all in all, not a bad afternoon.  It's nice to see that there's some culture going on in the city.  Sometimes I get so caught up with my own daily grind (wake up, go to work, go to sleep), that I forget there are places right here in this city were people are taking time out of their busy lives to make art.  This ballet may not be my cup of tea exactly, but I'm glad people are doing it.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged: Review of a Stage Play

(Stage Play)

I saw the Circle Theater production of this play.  Click HERE for more information or to get your tickets.

I had never heard of this play before, although my parents say they saw it 25 years ago in London.  According to Wikipedia, it dates back to the 1980s.  

The production I saw was very high energy.  The 3 actors were constantly running around and jumping and yelling, and I'm sure by the end they must have been absolutely exhausted.  But when the premise of the play is that only 3 actors perform all of Shakespeare in 97 minutes, then I guess you expect the actors to get their work-out.  To their credit, though, they looked like they were also having a ball doing it, so it's good they enjoy their work.

The play had a kind of maniac Marx Brothers type energy to it.  There were lots of jokes packed into every minute.  Some of them were funny, some of them weren't, but the jokes were flying out so fast that at least some of them were bound to land, and a number of them did.

The characterization seemed to me a bit inconsistent--the actors were constantly changing back and forth between who was the straight man and who was the buffoon. (An actor would appear to be highly knowledgably about Shakespeare one minute, and a complete ignoramus the next).  But when you've only got 3 actors to play off, then I guess you need to switch things around a lot.  

There were a lot of local references and topical references in the play that I saw, which couldn't have been part of the play in the 1980s.  But according to Wikipedia:  

The fourth wall is nonexistent in the performance, with the actors speaking directly to the audience during much of the play, and some scenes involve audience participation. The director and stage crew may also be directly involved in the performance and become characters themselves.

The script contains many humorous footnotes on the text that are often not included in the performance. However, improvisation plays an important role and it is normal for the actors to deviate from the script and have spontaneous conversations about the material with each other or the audience. It is also common for them to make references to pop culture or to talk about local people and places in the area where the play is being performed. Also, the authors' notes strongly encourage performers to update outdated references and jokes so that the material doesn't come off as out of touch. As a result, performances differ, even with the same cast.

As the above indicates, this is one of those plays that involves a lot of interaction with the audience.  But in the age of television, that's what you want from a stage play, right?  If all you wanted to do was to sit back and watch characters perform, you can do that at home with your TV.

And speaking of Wikipedia, the Wikipedia summary of the plot is pretty accurate.  It's a very good summary of the play that I saw.  If you're curious, you can read it.  Or, if you want to avoid spoilers, don't read it, and go see the play for yourself.

Addendum: July 29, 2025

I'm not sure why I did this as a written review rather than a video review.  I guess because it was a local performance, I thought it would confuse my audience on Youtube.  But although the performance was local, the play itself has a long history, so I could have made a video talking about the play itself as well as the local performance.

In the future, I think I'll do stage plays as video reviews.  This will make it consistent with my policy for reviewing other media. 

This particular review I'll just let stand as it is.  (i.e. I'm not going to give this the Scripted Review treatment and try to retroactively make a Youtube video out of it.)  But going forward I'll do Youtube videos for any stage plays that I watch.

Addendum: March 14, 2026

Actually, on second thought, maybe I will keep these reviews of stage plays as written only.  It feels a bit unnatural to put this stuff on Youtube.  

Stage Plays and Theater Index

Million Dollar Quartet,

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged,

Wizard of Oz Ballet by the Grand Rapids Ballet School Junior Company

As my reviews project has gradually increased over the years to include everything I read, watch or listen to, I thought I should include stage plays as well.  I don't have a lot to report on at the moment, but perhaps this index will gradually increase over the years.