Writers: Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux
Director: Jonathan O’Boyle
A night of the “devil’s music” awaits you at The Arts at Marble Arch as the Barn Theatre’s production of Million Dollar Quartet transfers to London. Largely celebrating the producer Sam Phillips, who here narrates his own story as the founder of rock n’ roll, this crowd-pleasing musical spins out from a single fact: that his stable of stars – Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash – arrived at his Sun Records studio one night in December 1956 alongside wannabe singer-pianist Jerry Lee Lewis, and the group spent a few hours together. Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux’s show doesn’t assume much happens, but it’s as good an excuse as any for a concert of their songs and others from the era.
Music producer Sam Phillips has a plan to sign big star Johnny Cash to the Sun Records label for another three years, having already lost Elvis to RCA. Inviting the men he made back to the studio, he hopes to call on their nostalgia as fame, money and a bigger scale call them away. But not everyone is comfortable with Sam’s plans for them.
Million Dollar Quartet has a fairly weak narrative that delivers little insight into the four men, all at different stages of their career or the inevitable clashing egos when they all play far too nice. What might have been an opportunity to consider the 1950s music industry, the rapidly accelerating nature of success for those like Elvis in under a year, and the expectations that rock n’ roll swept aside are given little attention. There is an underlying tension between the four performers, particularly between the waning Perkins still searching for a new hit (peeved that Elvis stole his Blue Suede Shoes) and the firecracker enthusiasm from Lewis, but it barely registers as jeopardy in this easy-going show.
But its intended audience won’t care at all. Staged as an impromptu jamming session, the performance is filled with recognisable songs that you are encouraged to bounce along to, with each singer delivering their own work as well as joining in as musicians and backing vocalists on the others. At the end, everyone is encouraged to their feet to hear another set of post-curtain call solos that the auditorium can dance to, and in that respect it will hit the mark for a lot of theatregoers looking for a fun night out.
The whole thing is held together by Darren Day as Phillips, who acts as the narrator in the first half, providing some context on the careers he started as well as the producer’s hopes, although Director Jonathan O’Boyle doesn’t quite know what to do with the non-singing Day during the musical numbers, forcing him back and forth to the recording box at the back – at least he’s getting his steps up. As the four stars, Joe Bence is an energetic and supremely confident Lewis, Christopher Erasmus is a cool and understated Cash, Joey Bradick offers a discontented edge as Perkins, while Connor Payne avoids parody with a still sweet and homely Elvis.
There’s a bit of a gender imbalance with only Jenay Naima in the cast as Elvis’ girlfriend, known only as ‘Dyanne ’, who sings as much as the men but doesn’t get her name on the poster. Neither does the story have quite as much to say about relationships between the tense group dynamic, commercial interests and the creative process as David Adjmi’s Stereophonic, yet this concert-based musical knows the reaction it wants, and everyone works hard to deliver it.
Runs until 6 December 2026
