Playing the hits

Million Dollar Quartet
Confederation Centre of the Arts
June 19, 2025

With the Charlottetown Festival’s evergreen Anne of Green Gablesmusical running only intermittently in recent years, the festival’s firmest fixture of late is not a show but a genre: the jukebox musical, scripts built around catalogs of preexisting popular songs. 

Such musicals have long been a frequent feature of the festival roster; and in this uncertain era of on-and-off Anne, the last several festival seasons have leaned into the reassuring reliability of that theatrical comfort food, always including at least one jukebox musical—such as this season’s mainstage revival of Million Dollar Quartet. 

Penned by Colin Escott & Floyd Mutrux, MDQ is loosely based on a December 4, 1956 recording session during which Sun Records stars Johnny Cash (portrayed here by Jacob Hemphill), Jerry Lee Lewis (Connor Lucas) and Carl Perkins (Kale Penny) played an impromptu jam session with visiting Sun alumnus Elvis Presley (Frankie Cottrell). 

Sun Records founder Sam Phillips (Stephen Guy-McGrath) hosted this “million dollar quartet” (a nickname coined by newspaper reporter Bob Johnson), and Sun’s recordings of the session were later released on several albums. The Mutrux/Escott musical adaptation launched in 2006, hit Broadway in 2010 and made its Charlottetown Festival debut in 2017. 

MDQ mixes fiction with its facts. The 1956 recording session included drummer W. S. “Fluke” Holland and Perkins’ brothers Jay & Clayton on guitar & upright bass, but the musical’s only sidemen are Fluke (Trevor Grant) and a lone composite Perkins brother, a bass-playing Jay (Evan Stewart). Similarly, Presley’s dancer girlfriend Marilyn Evans (a spectator in 1956) is replaced in the musical by a fictional singer girlfriend, Dyanne (Jamie McRoberts), who joins the jam session. 

The musical script also takes chronological liberties, plumping its thin plot by having Cash and Carl Perkins preparing to quit Sun Records much earlier than they did in real life. This adds some drama, as does a subplot about Phillips considering selling Sun Records, plus assorted rivalries and frictions among the jam session’s four big stars, much of it sparked by the famously volatile Lewis, the musical’s main comedic catalyst. 

Only a handful of the show’s 20-plus songs were played in the 1956 session; but it’s hard to fault the musical’s loaded lineup of crowd-pleasing classics, including standouts such as McRoberts’ “Fever,” Hemphill’s “Sixteen Tons” and a rousing rendition of “Ghost Riders” led by Hemphill’s Cash with eerie backing vocals from McRoberts. 

Returning cast members Guy-McGrath, Grant & Stewart all slip smoothly back into their 2017 roles, the latter two’s contributions building a rock-solid rhythmic foundation for the spirited, skillful onstage band assembled by director Adam Brazier and music co-directors Bob Foster & Noah Malcolm. 

The five stars of that band—Cottrell, Hemphill, Lucas, McRoberts & Penny—all put on a great show concert-wise and are also able actors: Penny’s sour Perkins, Lucas’s manic Lewis, Cottrell’s aw-shucks Presley, McRoberts’ warmly shrewd Diane, and especially Hemphill’s stoic Cash. 

As creator and star of a past Charlottetown Festival show about Cash (2023’s The Songs of Johnny & June), Hemphill is unsurprisingly the best mimic in the 2025 MDQ cast. He captures the voice and vibe of Johnny Cash in both song and dialogue, amping up the nostalgic emotional kick of the musical for aging Cash fans like me. 

It’s a visually rich production with a plausibly detailed studio set that morphs into a showy concert space (all designed by William Layton), costumes ranging from muted workaday garb to gleefully garish finale outfits (also Layton’s designs), and moodily evocative lighting design by Davida Tkach. There are hiccups here and there—the show overindulges in fog and haze effects, and occasional audio glitches on opening night included Penny’s mic cutting in and out—but all in all, it’s a handsome, technically solid show. 

As I wrote back in 2017, MDQ is “a fast-moving, hard-rocking, good-natured blur of a musical—more concert than drama, but packing enough of the latter to give the material emotional resonance.” Same goes for the 2025 edition, so it’s well worth putting another quarter in this jukebox.