On the top floor of Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden a young man who was born in Beirut is singing Arthur Big Boy Crudup’s That’s Alright Mama to a Tennessee hillbilly.
This cross-cultural pollination is taking place because the young man, Michael Malarkey, will play Elvis Presley when the Broadway hit musical Million Dollar Quartet opens in the West End next month.
Chuck Mead, self-confessed hillbilly and the show’s musical supervisor, is attempting to teach Malarkey something about the soul of the South. Mead should know – he’s been playing guitar on Nashville stages since he was 12 years old.
I recognise Mead straight away. Back in the mid-Nineties he led a band called BR5-49, a hard-driving, tight-harmony country/rock/rockabilly group that played to full houses at Robert’s Western World, a club and clothes shop on Lower Broadway in Nashville.
I lived in America in those days and whenever I visited Nashville I would head to Robert’s. A procession of outstanding bands – of which BR5-49 was just one – passed through, playing day and night for tips and living in hope that a big-label scout would see them and sign them up.
So Mead has paid his dues. And now he’s teaching the boy from Beirut what it was like to be the boy from Tupelo.
“Actually it hasn’t been hard,” Mead says during a rehearsal break. “These guys really do get the South. Last week we did a whole day of 'Southern talk’, when Eric [Schaeffer, the show’s director] and I talked about the history, the music, the hillbillies, the prejudices – and they really got into that.”
Million Dollar Quartet is set in Sam Phillips’s Sun recording studio in Memphis just before the Christmas of 1956 and based on an actual event, at a time when gospel, rhythm and blues, country and rockabilly were metamorphosing into the music that changed the world: rock’n’roll. The eponymous quartet are Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, all discovered by Phillips and signed to his Sun label. On that day Elvis, who had already left the label and was on his way to becoming an international star, came home for Christmas and popped in to Sun studios to see his old friends.
That moment, and the brief jam session that followed, provide the platform for the musical, but it is also a story about innocence lost. As Mead concedes, however much the musicians and performances are centre stage throughout, Million Dollar Quarter is also the rather poignant story of Phillips, the brilliant talent-spotter and producer, who having nurtured these prodigious talents was about to lose three of his most-gifted protégés to the outside world.
Mead and Schaeffer opened the show in Chicago two and a half years ago and it’s still running there. The Broadway production has had full houses for 18 months and last year Levi Kreis won a Tony for his brilliant portrayal of the incendiary Jerry Lee Lewis. A hard act to follow? Not according to Mead.
“When we first saw Ben Goddard [who’ll play Lewis in London] we knew, as Sam Phillips would have said, we had our next star. I liked the way he played piano and what Eric liked was the way he could preach like Jerry Lee – and that’s hard to do.” Goddard most recently played Joe Gillis in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard.
Broadway, like our own West End, is replete with jukebox musicals, with their thin excuses for plots and storylines that are built around a string of all-too-familiar pop hits sung by joyless ensembles. Million Dollar Quartet is more than that, something closer to Jersey Boys, the bio-musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, than, say, Dreamboats and Petticoats, a stage show built off the back of a successful CD.
“A lot of people compare this to Jersey Boys and I can live with that,” Mead says.
The infectious energy of the musicians and the timelessness of the songs also make this a musical for more than nostalgic baby-boomers. I saw the Broadway show with my teenage daughter, who has been living on an audio diet of Tinie Tempah, Lil Wayne and Lady Gaga – and she was entranced.
Now rehearsals are back in full flow. Malarkey’s Elvis is crooning into the mic the old Dean Martin standard Memories Are Made Of This. This was mainstream American popular music at its most anodyne. Sam Phillips stops him in mid chorus and implores him to “do something that will surprise me”. Malarkey starts singing That’s Alright Mama, then the band drops in and suddenly the song, the character and the room light up. It’s one of the first flashes of rock ’n’ roll, and you can just see how it happened half a century ago.
Mead grins broadly. The soul of the South is alive and well in London.
Million Dollar Quartet is at the Noël Coward Theatre, London WC2 (0844 482 5141) from Feb 8.
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