MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET
The Arts at Marble Arch
★★★★★
“a pitch‑perfect explosion of nostalgia, talent and sheer rock ’n’ roll magic”
Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Records, tiled the walls of his Memphis studio himself, to get exactly the right sound. Million Dollar Quartet sells itself as the night in 1956 when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis jammed together, and it delivers that night in full. But the story it tells belongs to Phillips: a man with the ear and the daring to back unknowns until they became the most famous voices in history.
Darren Day plays him as narrator and ringmaster, stepping out of the session to explain how he spotted and shaped talent. Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux’s book gives him the best spoken material of the evening, including the sale of Elvis’ contract to RCA for $40,000. The deal made Phillips look a fool until he put the money into a local business called Holiday Inn. Day tells the tale with relish.
The four young men he gathered came from nothing, and Jonathan O’Boyle’s production never lets us forget it. These are the sons of cotton farmers and sharecroppers. Folsom Prison Blues lands as a song from that hard world, not just a back catalogue hit. Connor Payne’s Elvis is all charm and restless hips, already gone on to better things. Joey Bradick gives Perkins the bruised pride of a man who wrote Blue Suede Shoes and watched someone else make it famous. Joe Bence is the cocky newcomer at the piano, looking spookily like the real Jerry Lee Lewis. Equally convincing is Johnny Cash played by Christopher Erasmus.
Then Jenay Naima, as Elvis’s girlfriend Dyanne, starts to sing. The room holds its breath. It’s the one moment where the show slows down and trusts a single voice.
The biggest tech roles of the night were inevitably musical supervision (Lee Freeman) and sound (Nick Lodge) which were triumphs. The retro designs of both the studio and the costumes (Libby Watson) were excellent, Lighting (Alex Musgrave) was flawless and movement (Joanna Goodwin) kept the whole company rocking, and the audience with it.
Inevitably, rivalries and betrayals are sketched rather than explored. The drama is sometimes simply the gap between one song and the next. Without Phillips’ narration, this would be a tribute concert. With it, the show is the story of how one man heard the future before anyone else.
The production saves the best for last, and Great Balls of Fire gets the audience on its feet. Million Dollar Quartet is a pitch‑perfect explosion of nostalgia, talent and sheer rock ’n’ roll magic.
MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET
The Arts at Marble Arch
Reviewed on 15th September
by Elizabeth Botsford
Photography by Alex Tabrizi from the Barn Theatre production
