★★★★★

“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.

HERE COMES J EDGAR!

King’s Head Theatre

★★★★

“As history, it’s candy-coated; as theatre, it’s a joy: an immaculately performed comedy”

The all-singing, all-dancing Here Comes J. Edgar! lifts the veil on what secrets a man must keep to satiate the power of love and the love of power.

J. Edgar Hoover was the most feared man in twentieth-century America. Founder of the modern FBI, he was the blackmailer-in-chief whose filing cabinets kept a succession of presidents awake at night. Here Comes J. Edgar! gives him the full Technicolor musical comedy treatment. This is the Disneyfied version of the Hoover story: the surveillance, the secret files, the whispers about his ‘life-time assistant’, about dresses and strands of pearls, all rendered in the bright, brassy idiom of golden-age Broadway. The point is made that his own underworld connections led to the FBI shifting focus from organized crime to ‘anti-Communism’. The audience can join the dots regarding how that might have contributed to modern America’s underbelly. But the show would much rather you tapped your foot. Mostly, you can’t resist.

The pedigree is extraordinary. Book and lyrics are by Harry Shearer (This Is Spinal Tap, The Simpsons) and Tom Leopold (Seinfeld, Cheers), with music by the late Peter Matz, arranger of Barbra Streisand’s early albums and musical director of The Carol Burnett Show. The evening gives ‘mid-century Broadway heyday’ in spades thanks to director Josh Seymour and Olivier-winning choreographer Bill Deamer. The intimate King’s Head auditorium turns it up close and personal.

At the centre, making his London debut, Bryan Batt is outstanding. Best known as Mad Men’s Salvatore Romano, Batt is a Broadway veteran, and it shows. His Hoover is preening, vain, dangerous and yet touching, a monster who believes himself to be the hero. Batt relishes the part.

He is surrounded by a great ensemble. Hugo Bolton makes a devoted, wounded Clyde Tolson. Marc Elliott rattles through Walter Winchell’s staccato gossip with glee; Laura Medforth veers between poise and barely restrained sexual frustration as Helen Gandy, keeper of the files; and Judith Owen brings smoky authority to the Lady in Red. The production looks a treat (set, Sophia Pardon; costumes, Tom Paris; lighting, Jamie Platt; sound, Nick Lodge), all sequinned with a G-man’s edge.

Matz’s score is generous to a fault: the numbers keep coming. The pastiche is affectionate and expertly built. Ben Ferguson’s orchestrations keep it all fizzing. However, ballad is laid upon ballad to the point where a red editing pen could be deployed to good effect. The other issue keeping the fifth star locked in the filing cabinet is the lack of a single showstopper to send you out, humming along Upper Street.

But what timing for the show’s opening! The machine created by J. Edgar Hoover has surfaced in the rumour mill’s eerily similar functioning surrounding another powerful, long-standing, homophobic American political figure who died last week. Indeed, an American musical this pointed taking its world premiere in Islington rather than New York may be the evening’s driest joke of all.

As history, it’s candy-coated; as theatre, it’s a joy: an immaculately performed comedy.

Tag Archives: Nick Lodge

MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET

★★★★★

The Arts at Marble Arch

MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET

The Arts at Marble Arch

★★★★★

“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

MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET

MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET

MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET

HERE COMES J EDGAR!

★★★★

King’s Head Theatre

HERE COMES J EDGAR!

King’s Head Theatre

★★★★

“As history, it’s candy-coated; as theatre, it’s a joy: an immaculately performed comedy”