When ‘Million Dollar Quartet’ rocks, it rolls

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on August 14, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

by Lawrence Toppman

There’s a moment near the end of “Million Dollar Quartet” at the Cain Center that will tell you whether you have one grain of rock and roll in your soul.

The show has stopped pretending to be a dramatic narrative and turned into the concert you always knew it was, with the title characters – Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis – stepping up to microphones to perform numbers. Matty Montes is wriggling on his back across the stage as Perkins, unleashing searing guitar licks, while Ian Benjamin is playing the piano behind his back while sitting atop it, as Lewis was wont to do. A whole lotta shakin’ is indeed going on. If you are immune to it, you are 1) at the wrong musical or 2) rockalistically speaking, dead.

I had never seen a production at Cornelius’ Cain Center for the Arts, but it proved to be an ideal venue for this intimate yet energized musical, the first co-production between the Cain and Davidson Community Players. The sound mix reached cleanly to the penultimate row of the theater, where I sat, and I was close enough to see both the hip-swiveling bravura of Eli Fischer’s Elvis Presley and the expressions on the faces of the near-silent rhythm combo at the back, bass player Forrest Brown and drummer Paul Fisher.

The show was nominated for a 2010 Tony Award for original musical (it lost to “Memphis,” another show set in the Blues City), yet the most original thing about it is how little really happened this way.

Yes, the four artists ran into each other on a December night in 1956 at Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios. Cash had come to hear Perkins record; Lewis, who was in the ascendant at Sun, was pumping the piano; Presley, who had recently defected from Sun to RCA, dropped by with a girlfriend to say hello to old acquaintances. Her name has been changed for the show from Marilyn to Dyanne; the real Marilyn didn’t sing a note, but Julia Freeman’s Dyanne delivers an explosive “I Hear You Knockin’.”

The actual recording from that event consists mostly of gossip, tomfoolery and snippets of songs, many of them gospel numbers. Cash is virtually inaudible, Perkins reduced to a backup singer. Of course, that won’t do onstage, so we get almost two-dozen full-length rockers, from the obscure (Lewis’ “Real Wild Child”) to the familiar: Presley’s “Hound Dog,” with a projection of Big Mama Thornton (who recorded it first) behind him.

Floyd Mutrux, who co-wrote the script with Colin Escott, is credited in the program with “original concept and direction,” though Scott Albert actually directed the fast-moving version at Cain.

Mutrux depicts Phillips, played with stubborn pride by Brandon Samples, as a man atop a crumbling empire. He still has Lewis in his stable (where he’ll remain for six years), but Elvis has already been at RCA for a year. Cash has signed with Columbia Records, and Perkins is following him out the door. Phillips must decide whether to abandon Sun himself to work with Presley again at RCA. (The show doesn’t tell us what happened, but he stayed put at Sun until he sold it in 1969.)

Unlike the jukebox musicals “Jersey Boys” (about the Four Seasons) and “Tina” (about Tina Turner), “Quartet” tells us nothing new about these artists. So the reason to see the show is to find out whether the four leads pay appropriate homage.

Connor Nielsen catches Cash’s amiable shyness, though he lacks the low notes for “I Walk the Line” and sang flat on “Sixteen Tons.” Fischer’s Presley is a character, awkward and gentle except when singing, and not a caricature. Montes is a flashier guitarist than Perkins, who couldn’t (or at least didn’t) play such complicated solos and never used this much reverb. I liked it, though.

On Broadway, flamboyant Levi Kreis won a Tony for playing Lewis and stole much of the show. That happens here, too, with Benjamin sassing the more established singers, smashing the keys (yet always musically), surprising us with the occasional subdued solo and generally living up to Lewis’ nickname of The Killer. Whether you find Jerry Lee infuriating, weirdly compelling or just plain nuts, you can’t take your eyes off him when Benjamin’s on a roll.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.