STAGE WEST: "The Ballad of Johnny and June" at La Jolla Playhouse

In the foreground (left to right): Patti Murin, Christopher Ryan Grant and Van Hughes in "The Ballad of Johnny and June" at La Jolla Playhouse.                                                                    Photo by Rich Soublet II

            In “The Ballad of Johnny and June,” a world-premiere bio-musical at La Jolla Playhouse, there are three versions of how country music’s royal couple, Johnny Cash and June Carter, first met. They all happened backstage at a show, but Johnny (Christopher Ryan Grant) remembers it one way, June (Patti Murin) remembers it another, and the pair’s only child together, John Carter Cash (Van Hughes), who’s also the show’s narrator, tells us nobody knows for sure how it went down.
            One thing is certain: Neither Johnny’s nor June’s life would be the same, and they would ultimately spend the rest of their lives together. (Both passed away in 2003, Johnny just four months after June.)
            The presence of a grown John Carter Cash onstage in this collaborative musical by Des McAnuff and Robert Cary is reflective of the development and incubation of this show. McAnuff’s involvement came at the behest of the Cash estate – Johnny Cash had been a major fan of the Playhouse-born musical “Big River” (directed, as is this new show, by McAnuff) and was friends with its composer, Roger Miller. In meeting John Carter Cash in Nashville, McAnuff learned that Johnny and June’s son wanted to tell an authentic, un-“Hollywood” story of his parents’ lives and careers.
             “The Ballad of Johnny and June” became a collaboration between McAnuff, Cary and in a significant sense John Carter or JC.
            So “Ballad” is not a jukebox musical in which Grant and Murin simply perform the wonderful songs associated with Cash and Carter Cash. Neither is it a straightforward dramatization with musical performances included as in the 2005 film “Walk the Line” (which I do love, by the way).
Instead, John Carter Cash speaks to the audience throughout, beginning by asking who’s married and who’s in love. The premise is that he’s considering a proposal himself. It’s clear that JC believes his parents loved each other, through many taxing trials, and never stopped.
            Van Hughes’ Carter Cash is omnipresent onstage, along with his guitar, telling the tale of Johnny and June, in his mind setting the record straight about them, and singing and playing on his own – then later with the two co-stars.
            Those who’ve read up on Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash and/or those who remember well the movie with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon will recognize much of the unfolding details, the chronology of which begins with June as a member of the popular Carter Family singers and Johnny as a boy with a strict father and a brother who dies shortly after a gruesome table-saw accident.
            The beginnings of Johnny Cash’s career under the wing of Sun Records’ Sam Phillips is here, as is his first marriage to Vivian Liberto (Gabriella Joy) and the philandering he did during it, the circumstances that brought him and June Carter together, their quick and mutual infatuation, Johnny’s drug abuse and his run-ins with the law, et al.
            What “Ballad” brings to the fore are what likely only Cash/Carter historians and ultra-ardent fans may know: the disappointments of June’s two previous marriages, her relationship in the Carter Family hierarchy, and more revealing still, her personal addiction issues.
            The latter to some extent overturns the perception created by the 2005 movie that June saved Johnny from total self-destruction, period.
            It’s tempting to compare this new musical to that well-remembered film, for which Witherspoon won an Oscar and Phoenix lost Best Actor because he happened to be up against Philip Seymour Hoffman for “Capote.” Many will undertake this comparison. It’s not really fair – the film and this show are two separate entities in entirely different mediums, arriving nearly 20 years apart.
            On its own merits, “The Ballad of Johnny and June” is a fascinating, if somewhat stretched out, work of Broadway-aspiring musical theater, propelled by unforgettable music performed live by Grant and Murin (both of them first rate), an ensemble that includes Hughes and six others in various roles, and a rousing, adroit orchestra conducted by keyboardist/music director Lisa LeMay. (Guitarists Joe Payne and Lorraine Hussey are standouts.)
            For me, because so many of the events of Cash and Carter Cash’s life together are well known, there aren’t a lot of surprises in the storytelling outside of June’s addiction reveal, and on a gut, emotional level the show reverberates with me far more during the performance of songs than in the drama being played out in between them. That can be exhilarating (“Ring of Fire”) or devastating (Cash’s cover of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt”).
          Having John Carter Cash as narrator certainly accomplishes the goal of filtering the story through his prism – who would know his parents better than he does? The onstage narrator who breaks the fourth wall isn’t my preferred theatrical device, but Hughes is a likable and warm presence, whether on the periphery of or inside the story.
            As to the live music, it’s foot-stompin’ and frequently thrilling. Few of the tunes are performed in their entirety, but neither are these classics reduced to medley snippets. Grant -- moving, hugging his guitar and absolutely sounding like the deep, distinctively voiced Man in Black -- more than does justice to “I Walk the Line,” “Cry Cry Cry,” “Get Rhythm,” the early Cash breakthrough “Hey Porter” and, complete with mariachi accompaniment as it was on the record, “Ring of Fire.”
            The prison gig sequence (one enactment in this musical that I find inferior to the film version) features the iconic “Folsom Prison Blues,” the quintessential Johnny Cash number, but also the lesser “A Boy Named Sue.” I know this one was actually recorded live when Cash played at San Quentin in 1969, but it’s always seemed like a Cash catalogue outlier to me. Maybe a bone thrown to those who don’t know his canon well? Could there have been folks like that in the audience?
            Murin, to my mind the pillar of this show, runs the gamut from the delightfully cornball “No Swallerin’ Place” to the Carter Family’s introspective “Wildwood Flower.” She and Grant electrify with the duets “Jackson” and “I’ve Been Everywhere” (this latter enhanced by Sean Nieuwenhuis’ projections of all those swiftly name-dropped towns).
            Robert Cary’s original “The Ballad of Johnny and June” is sung by Hughes at various times throughout. It’s a reminder that this is JC’s story as much as that of his beloved if troubled parents.
            I was never fortunate enough to see Johnny and June live. Right now, this may be the next best thing.
            “The Ballad of Johnny and June” runs through July 7 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre.