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PLAYBILL AT OPENING NIGHT: Ring of Fire : A Night at the Opry
By Harry Haun
13 Mar 2006
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Richard Maltby, Jr.; Lari White; Jarrod Emick; Rosanne Cash; Carlene Carter; John Carter Cash; Jason Edwards; Cass Morgan & David M. Lutken; Harry Smith; Jane Seymour; Jennifer Love Hewitt; Larry Gatlin.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | It could have been the strong influx of Nashville influence, but the first-nighters at Ring
of Fire March 12 stomped and hollered and clapped and yelled till the cast of 14, every
manjack of them, returned to the Barrymore stage in various states of dishabille for
one last bow—and even then they didn’t stop until the show’s creator-director, Richard
Maltby, Jr. , was hoisted out of the audience over the footlights and placed centerstage.
Such extravagantly jubilant behavior is done all the time uptown at The Met by the
snooty set, but Broadway rarely has such nights. Titanic was one. Another was the time
Gwen Verdon stopped Can-Can cold with her Adam and Eve ballet gyrations and had to
brought back on stage—in a towel, yet!—before the audience would let the show go on.
“It was nice,” conceded Maltby a few hours later, by then all calm and cucumber-cool, at
the after-party in the eighth-floor Broadway Lounge of the Marriott Marquis. “Gerry
Schoenfeld says he’d never seen an opening night like this, ever—and Gerry Schoenfeld
has seen a few opening nights. Calling the whole cast back after they were already in their
dressing rooms, undressing—that is something that doesn’t happen very often, I’ll tell ya.”
Two-time Grammy-winning gospel singer Lari White , a Broadway virgin, was
flabbergasted by the response. “My favorite part of the evening? It was when I was naked
in the dressing room after the first curtain call, and I heard the announcement we needed
to get back on stage. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because they’re still applauding and won’t stop.’ I
thought, ‘Wow! They really did like it.’ So I got dressed in two seconds and ran back
out. It was a fabulous night, very special.” It’ll be hard to top her first night on Broadway.
Damn Yankees! Tony winner Jarrod Emick arrived back on stage open-shirted, with
belt-buckle jangling. “It’s such a privilege to do this show,” he said later. “When I found
out Richard was doing this, I called him twice and auditioned three times. I’ve been with
it since the start. There was no way I was going to let it go. It’s in my bones. This music
means so much to me, so much to my dad. I can’t wait for him to get here to see it. That’s
all we had—Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton and Johnny Mathis —all we listened to. I have
such respect for Cash’s music and everybody in the cast I get a chance to do it with.”
Continuing the strong jaw-line of the macho cast was Jeb Brown . (His name, by the way,
comes from his initials—John Emerson Brown—and not the Bible.) Brown and White
blend nicely into a series of sexy, romantic duets, but his favorite moment plays on
another color: “I love doing ‘Man in Black,’ because it’s a song that a lot of people know,
but I don’t think they’ve really heard the words recently. They were written in 1971,
during Vietnam, and here we are again in so many ways. It has potency and resonance.
“What we’re doing is theatricalizing the music, which is not hard to do because Cash
wrote story songs so often. Occasionally, we make a song into a conversation, but mostly
we just tell the story and then put it on its feet. It’s surprising how easily it translates.”
He conceded there seemed to be a lot of Southern-fried hospitality out there on opening
night. “We’ve been playing to very fantastic houses for a while now, but there was a
different flavor out there tonight. It was a Nashville flavor. There was a sense we were
performing for the royal family of Nashville. It was fascinating to hear the material go out
there and be received in a slightly different way. It wasn’t bigger or lesser—just different.”
Brown wasn’t delusional. Honored guests at the opening included the recording-star
daughters of Johnny Cash (Rosanne Cash ) and June Carter (Carlene Carter ) and their
son, John Carter Cash . Everyone should have the month of Sundays these three have
just had: Last Sunday, Reese Witherspoon picked up an Oscar for her portrayal of June
in Walk the Line ; this Sunday, a song she wrote with Merle Kilgore 43 years ago for Cash
became the title tune of a Broadway musical celebrating the songs Cash sang as well as
the country folks he sang to. Maltby created it as a kind of musical American cavalcade. Continued...
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