Talkin Broadway is actually sorta Mixed:
"It takes a genius to create art from the everyday, but a skilled craftsman can at least make the pedestrian above average. And as far as theatre craftsmen go, you can do much worse than Richard Maltby, Jr., the primary saving grace behind the Broadway production of Ring of Fire that just opened at the Barrymore.
Bucking the trend of recent, troubling seasons, creator and director Maltby has not simply shoved songs written or made famous by Johnny Cash (1932-2003) into an awful book that only highlights their nonexistent theatricality. Instead, he's fashioned them into a rough, bookless tour through the spirit of Cash's life, with all the attendant pleasure and pain. And, amazingly, there's a time or two when Ring of Fire achieves its goal of being a good, old-fashioned Broadway hoedown. (And it certainly does more for red state relations than did Urban Cowboy in 2003 or last season's revival of Steel Magnolias.)
But if this isn't Mamma Mia!, it also isn't Ain't Misbehavin', the Fats Waller song-catalog show Maltby led to terrific success in 1978. That show also had no book to speak of. But Maltby nonetheless established a theatrical atmosphere, so that it always seemed a story was being told; cast members played consistent characters from start to finish, thus allowing for interplay and escalating tension generally alien to the traditional revue.
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But as there's no real continuity, neither a story nor characters can ever fully form. So despite Maltby's best efforts, despite the impressive work of projection designer Michael Clark and lighting designer Ken Billington to give the show a varied visual look with an LED-scenery-billboard backdrop, and despite Lisa Shriver's attempts to unify the show's movement with a country choreographic language, everything still ultimately exists in a vacuum.
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The show never improves on that, but throughout it's far better than it has to be, especially given Cash's recent popularity resurgence (thanks to the success of the recent film about his life, Walk the Line), and the usual jukebox musical ethic of doing the least possible work for the maximum possible profit. Ring of Fire won't go down in theatre history as a titanic disaster (like Good Vibrations), or as a legitimately inspired hit (like Jersey Boys). But it knows what it is and never pretends to be anything else. Of that, if nothing else, Cash would have been rightfully proud. "
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/RingOfFire.html
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
