The Ballad of Johnny & June
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
The last big musical number in The Ballad of Johnny & June, a jukebox musical about two of American country music’s biggest stars, is an emotional duet of the love song Always on My Mind.
Most famously recorded by Johnny Cash’s contemporary Elvis Presley and his sometime collaborator Willie Nelson, it’s associated with neither Cash nor his wife, June Carter Cash. Its emotional lyricism suits the poignancy of the theatrical moment, in which the famous couple reconfirm their love for each other after decades of drama involving drug abuse, but it is ultimately a bizarre choice.
Surely there was a song in the Cash-Carter catalogue that might have done the same work. Who wants to leave a musical about the lives of two singularly talented artists thinking about other musicians?
This musical misstep is among a series of troubling aspects about The Ballad of Johnny & June, which was written by its director, Des McAnuff, and Robert Cary, with Johnny and June’s son, John Carter Cash, credited as story consultant.
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He is also a leading character in the stage drama, narrating his parents’ story as a fairy tale, complete with dark and challenging moments. He starts at the end, then circles back to the beginning, providing a chronology of his parents’ lives before they met each other for the first time, backstage on the night of Cash’s debut at the Grand Ole Opry, in Nashville.
We get the highlights – number-one singles, Cash’s infamous prison performances, his birth – as well as the low points: multiple arrests, interventions at the Betty Ford clinic.
Some of this is played out in scenes between Johnny and June; others are narrated by John Carter Cash through song, particularly the original composition that gives the musical its name, which was composed by Cary and McAnuff, with the arranger and orchestrator Ron Melrose.
With its toe-tapping rockabilly rhythm, it is a plausible country tune, but the basic lyrics, which foreshadow an unforgivable slip into sentimentality in the second act, just can’t compete with the well-known songs from the Cash-Carter catalogue – Folsom Prison Blues, Hey Porter, I Walk the Line, Ring of Fire – which make up the bulk of the musical numbers.
As if aware of the material’s dramaturgical shortcomings, McAnuff throws everything at the production, which is luxuriously styled by set designer Robert Brill, costume designer Sarafina Bush and lighting designer Amanda Zieve.
The set is a neat and compact slatted crate, which is variously unpacked to become a domestic space, a recording studio, a cavernous stage, a prison and a rehab centre. Although Christopher Ryan Grant, Christina Bianco and Ryan O’Donnell need no vocal support as Johnny, June and John Carter, there are also 10 singers on stage, whose contributions vocally and via a variety of instruments, including washboards and flutes, bring an enormous amount of atmosphere and life to the staging, not to mention the sonic input from the six-piece onstage band.
All of which is to say that if you’re there for the music, as many audience members will be, The Ballad of Johnny & June fits the bill, and a director couldn’t ask more from his excellent cast. As a piece of storytelling, however, it is a disappointment.
The Ballad of Johnny & June is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, April 11th
