Judging by the sea of happy, AARP-eligible faces behind us (on a Sunday night, too), Harrah’s Las Vegas has a long-term winner in Broadway pickup Million Dollar Quartet. The crowd dug the music, the period outfits, the liberal artistic license and seemed willing to forgive the glaring anachronisms. (The recording booth features tape machines from several different decades and no producer worth his salt would roll session tape at low-fidelity 3.75 inches per second.) The plot is a tissue — of the Kleenex sort — derived from an historic gathering of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis at the studios of Sun Records. There’s a fifth vocalist, a girlfriend of Presley’s, who’s there just to be The Girl, sing “Fever” and cause erotic tensions among the menfolk.
The dialogue features lines like, “Elvis just called; he’s up the street.” Yes, it’s that bad. Only a shrugged, laconic “I’ve been everywhere” from Cash, when asked to account for his whereabout, acknowledges the cheesiness of the enterprise. Otherwise, the characters run to form: Elvis loudly declares he’ll never play Vegas; Lewis puts his foot on the piano; Perkins gets angry a lot because he knows he’ll be the least-remembered of the four and Cash is The Voice of Reason. At the end, all four don gaudy carnival outfits and do a mega-mix of their greatest hits. It’s de rigeur for the jukebox musical (of which Million Dollar Quartet is one of the lesser entries) but begs the question of why we’re not watching a really good impersonator show instead. MDQ is like a plot-laden porno, but with songs where the sex scenes would be.
