No Johnny Cash in new Johnny Cash Broadway musical

By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The director of the new Johnny Cash
stage musical, “Ring of Fire,” struggles to define exactly what
the show is, but one thing is certain — no one portrays the
country music legend known as “The Man in Black.”

“This isn’t a biography,” director Richard Maltby told
reporters on Wednesday at a rehearsal for the show that starts
previews on Broadway next month for a March 12 opening.

“It’s 38 songs without connecting material, but it’s not a
revue,” he said.

“It has a story, it has characters,” he continued, but no
plot. “It’s some other kind of theater piece, a play made up of
songs. It’s a book-musical without a book.”

Confused? All will become clear, Maltby said, when
audiences see what he calls a classic tale of American life —
not Cash’s own life but the story of an everyman who emerges
from the songs he wrote.

“It seemed when you put it all together to tell an almost
mythical story,” said Maltby, who won a Tony award for
conceiving and directing the Fats Waller musical “Ain’t
Misbehavin”‘ and co-authored the hit musical “Miss Saigon.”

Featuring a string of favorites such as “I Walk the Line”
and “Ring of Fire,” the musical has six main actors who play a
couple in their 20s, a couple in their 40s and a couple in
their 60s.

“You can relate to all these different ages of his life,”
Maltby said. “Those couples could be seen as the same couple at
the three different stages of life or it could be seen as three
generations of the same family.”

FIVE YEARS IN THE MAKING

Producer Bill Meade spent five years persuading Cash to
give his approval for a musical. Cash agreed just before his
death at age 71 in 2003, which came just months after that of
his wife, country singer June Carter Cash.

Meade said Cash was a big fan of Broadway and was excited
about the prospect of a musical using his songs, though he was
uncertain when the subject first came up.

“He said, ‘Do you feel that my material is good enough?”‘
Meade told Reuters. “He’s a guy who’s won every single
conceivable award that’s been given to everybody in the world,
and there was this sense of humility.”

The show follows the critically acclaimed Cash biographical
film “Walk the Line,” a coincidence that Maltby said should
boost the musical given that it takes a radically different
approach.

A pre-Broadway run in Buffalo, New York, last year won good
reviews and Wednesday’s rehearsal offered a lively rendition of
“I’ve Been Everywhere” that had reporters tapping along to the
beat.

All 14 actors strum on acoustic guitars and there’s plenty
of line-dancing and cowboy boots.

Maltby said what he was striving for was authenticity.

“Johnny Cash didn’t want to be Broadway-ized. … He
couldn’t see Johnny Cash songs and chorus girls.”