"Are we in for a concert?" asked an opening-night playgoer as we filed into the Goodman's north room - a valid question from someone anticipating another lockstep Greatest Hits revue. But just as a photograph freezes an instant in time's inexorable progression, so does this musical docudrama by Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux encapsulate, with all the tension and regret that comes of hindsight, a pivotal moment in the history of American popular music.
The facts: one December in 1956, Carl Perkins, a successful recording artist with Sun Studios, scheduled a rehearsal for a follow-up to his 1955 hit song Blue Suede Shoes. His session instrumentalists were his brother Jay on bass fiddle, an anonymous drummer, and an ambitious young pianist named Jerry Lee Lewis. In the course of the afternoon, current Sun client Johnny Cash stopped by, as did former Sun singer Elvis Presley, the latter accompanied by a Hollywood-lounge chanteuse. None of them knew that this occasion was both an end and a beginning-that Perkins' career had peaked, that Lewis' star would continue to rise, and that Presley and Cash would come to regret their departures from their roots in search of greener pastures and bigger paychecks.
At the center of these changing fortunes is Sam Phillips, the independent-label entrepreneur who single-handedly produced, mentored, encouraged, groomed and promoted the new talent springing from an economically-depressed postwar American south. But Phillips was no Father Flanagan - his quasi-patriarchal chagrin at the desertion of his money-makers is eased only by the recollection of his freshly-signed contracts with Lewis and another newcomer, Roy Orbison.
String-bassist Chuck Zayas and drummer Billy Shaffer deliver sturdy backbeat, while Deborah Harry-lookalike Kelly Lamont supplies soprano obbligato. But Brian McCaskill's authoritative presence in the role of Sam Phillips is what anchors us amid the - take a deep breath, now - Chekhovian themes underlying the camaraderie of artists whose love of their shared art ultimately transcends rivalries now long-forgotten.
