Musical Review: Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash

What happens when you give the gritty and rustic lyrics of Johnny Cash to highly trained, technically proficient, powerful Broadway vocalists? The result is sometimes stunning and other times disastrous, but always interesting.

After a one-month Broadway run, Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash, is now on a cross-country tour in an off-Broadway adaptation. The show is not a stage adaptation of Walk the Line: it utilizes an ensemble cast without stable characterizations and most of the two-hour run time is consumed by 33 Cash tunes with sparse monologues that weave the music together. The narratives are barely adequate and the grave mistake of the musical’s opening sequence is over-reliance on narrative as the cast takes turns relating rather dry facts of Cash’s childhood that sound like excerpts from Johnny Cash: The Children’s Book.

Things improve dramatically during the musical’s portrayal of the death of Johnny’s brother Jack. Here the creators abandon narrative in favor of evocation, as Jack’s death is greeted with a wailing rendition of “Waiting on the Far Side Banks of Jordan,” ostensibly delivered by Cash’s mother, that culminates in a stirring choral singing of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

Director Joe Calarco and choreographer Karma Camp make best use of the ensemble during an energetic singing of “Jackson” that features three pairs of Johnny Cashes and June Carters. Some individual performances, notably Steve Benoit’s “Cocaine Blues,” demonstrate similar energy and the performers are to be commended for not attempting Cash impersonations.

However, there clearly exists an interpretive gap between Cash and his theatrical portrayers. Musical theater actors are accustomed to interpreting songs in the context of a plot, but in Ring of Fire songs largely lack narrative value and require interpretation on their own merits. This explains some odd choices, such as Scott Stacy’s smiling rendition of “Delia’s Gone,” as if the grisly murder is a running joke with the audience, and a three-part harmony parody of “Dirty Old Egg Suckin’ Dog” for the purpose of satirizing the Grand Ole Opry.

While most interpretations are deficient, the musical’s creators use ensemble, gender-switching and big-show arrangement to achieve sometimes stunning results. “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is surprisingly genuine and effective performed by a trio of gorgeous females. Julie Meirick makes “Tear Stained Letter” sound more like Janis Joplin than Johnny Cash and Erin Parker belts her way through “All Over Again” with vocal power that Cash could only dream of. Whether due to the Broadway arrangements or their relative obscurity in the eyes of the casual Cash fan, these songs are refreshingly difficult to identify as part of the Cash canon. Of the Cash standards, “Walk the Line” features a charming male-female three-part harmony but “Folsom Prison Blues” and “A Boy Named Sue” don’t sound as good as the composers deviate little from Cash’s original arrangements and the cast sound like cheap imitators.

The Cash portrayed in Ring of Fire is Johnny Cash before the American Recordings: you won’t hear “Hurt” and the early portion of the show features a lot of honest-to-goodness down-home rockabilly ditties that the nose-ringed punk rockers who embraced Cash’s Rick Rubin sound blissfully ignore. Unfortunately, songs like “Country Boy” and “Five Feet High and Rising” don’t transpose well to the Broadway sound, and the preponderance of this material at the beginning of the show quickly makes the audience skeptical.

Ring of Fire was widely panned during its Broadway run due to the fact that the show’s music is not connected to a storyline. Indeed, this is the musical’s great flaw and the reason for the show’s rather narrow audience. It’s not for the Cash neophyte and not for the hardcore country fan who simply wants to see a Cash concert. Some will appreciate the risk inherent in bringing country to Broadway, and while the music is worthy of such appreciation, it’s hard for even the most avid musical theater goer to describe what Ring of Fire is about, and that reality is an even greater indictment of the show than its lack of a storyline. Ring of Fire provides enjoyable entertainment for those who are not expecting a Cash impersonation or biography but fails to affect the viewer after the curtain drops.