TT: Good rockin’ tonight

I report on two satisfying shows in this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Million Dollar Quartet and Keen Company’s off-Broadway revival of I Never Sang for My Father. Here’s an excerpt.
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Good clean rockabilly fun has come to Broadway in the form of “Million Dollar Quartet,” an unpretentious, engagingly energetic staged concert with just enough story to qualify it as a jukebox musical. The subject is the celebrated evening in 1956 when Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley got together at Sam Phillips’ recording studio in Memphis for an informal pre-Christmas jam session. These pop-music giants are respectively portrayed by Lance Guest, Levi Kreis, Robert Britton Lyons and Eddie Clendening, four accomplished musicians who evoke their legendary models without stooping to literal imitation. Put them together and you get a hell of a band….
Don’t go to “Million Dollar Quartet” looking for great acting. Three members of the front line are not professional actors (Mr. Guest is the ringer) and the book, by Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux, is tissue-thin. This is the kind of show that goes flat whenever the characters stop singing and start talking. Fortunately, they do plenty of the former and not too terribly much of the latter….
How good must a play be to make it worth seeing? It certainly needn’t be a masterpiece. Robert Anderson’s “I Never Sang for My Father,” which had a modest but respectable run on Broadway in 1968 and was then turned into a modestly successful film, is a post-“Glass Menagerie” kitchen-sink drama about an aging father (Keir Dullea) and his angry, alienated son (Matt Servitto). Though devoid of poetry, it’s so true to life that you’ll wince at every other line, and Keen Company’s revival is as satisfying as a meat-and-potatoes dinner whipped up by a five-star chef….
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Read the whole thing here.