A live take on a legendary session

There’s a moment each night in the “Million Dollar Quartet” stage musical when the audience sees a photo revealing that what they’ve just witnessed on stage -- a rock fan’s dream meeting of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins -- was no figment of a writer’s fertile imagination but a hard and happy fact of history.

“There are audible gasps every night,” said Colin Escott, the veteran pop music historian and writer. Escott wrote the book for the show that premiered in 2006 and comes to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa from Tuesday to May 6 ahead of a run at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood from June 19 to July 1.

The proof exists not just in that celebrated photo taken at Sam Phillips’ Sun Records label in Memphis but also in the recordings Phillips was savvy enough to make while the foursome was hanging out, chatting and playing for a couple of hours on Dec. 4, 1956.

The show’s creators -- Escott, director Eric Schaeffer and musical director Chuck Mead -- got the idea to create a staged version of the story that would transcend the basic jukebox musical, and it received laudatory reviews when it opened on Broadway in 2010.

Rather than serving up a quick evening of hits from a quartet of famous names, they set out to capture the informal, mutually inspirational mood of the musical conversation among five pop music pioneers -- Phillips included.

Beyond the intimate tone that contrasts with typical big-budget Broadway musicals, “The Million Dollar Quartet” also differs from most such shows in that all four actors do their own playing and singing -- there’s no pit orchestra or chorus backing them up.

“This show has never been slicked up,” said Schaeffer. “You know how things are on Broadway: Everything has to be bigger and better. But what’s always been at the heart of rock ‘n’ roll, and the key to this piece, is the raw energy of these guys playing.”

Mead, a roots-rock musician in his own right and former member of the country-rock band BR5-49, said, “I got this gig because I’m a hillbilly singer by trade.... I guess they hired me because they didn’t want it to be a Broadway musical interpretation of rock ‘n’ roll.”

The show highlights facets of the musicians’ early lives that many audience members might not know about, an educational aspect of the production that isn’t limited to the ticket-buying public.

“Strangely enough, I had never heard of Sun Records,” said Martin Kaye, the British actor cast in the touring version as Louisiana-born Lewis. Nicknamed “The Ferriday Fireball” for his performances at the piano in the ‘50s, Lewis is the last living member of the real-life Million Dollar Quartet.

“I grew up listening to Elton John and jazz and the Beatles,” Kaye said as the touring company began a two-week vacation, its first since the national tour began last fall. “My parents weren’t of the right age, and my grandparents would have been the people who disapproved of Jerry Lee Lewis, so my parents introduced me to other kinds of music.

“But as the show has progressed, I’ve come to appreciate how important this music was and why it’s so influential over the course of history,” Kaye said.

Indeed, geographically, culturally and chronologically, the musicians portrayed in “Million Dollar Quartet” were at ground zero of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, that fusion of country, blues and gospel music, black and white styles that merged into an explosive, liberating new sound.

The recorded evidence from that day at Sun was for a long time was little more than a rumor. The recordings were released internationally nine years before RCA put them out in official form in the U.S. -- in a 1990 package for which Escott wrote the liner notes. But the show is not only about the celebrated musicians.

“It’s really a David-and-Goliath story in a lot of ways,” Escott said from his home in Nashville. “It’s the story of how Sam Phillips -- and in a broader sense, all those guys who ran those small indie labels -- had the vision of this music that needed to be created, and it was taken away from them. It was co-opted by the bigger labels, who signed those artists away from them.”

That element provides what tension and drama exist in the largely upbeat show: Phillips had to sell the contract of the artist who would become the biggest star in rock history -- Elvis Presley -- for a meager $35,000 to keep his studio open to develop the other budding artists on the label.

Liberties have been taken dramatically so that each musician performs a few of his signature songs during what started out as a Carl Perkins session at Sun.

“Everything that happens in the show actually did happen, just not in one day,” said Schaeffer. “We’ve compressed things that took place over about 18 months into that one session.”

The show began in workshop productions in Florida in 2006, went on to a fully staged version in Chicago and then made it to Broadway in 2009. Actor Levi Kreis won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Lewis. Open-ended runs continue in New York at the New World Stages theater and at Chicago’s Apollo Theater in addition to the North American touring production.

Lewis himself made an appearance at one performance in 2010.

Not only did members of the media turn out in big numbers for that performance, so did Bill Clinton, the nation’s former saxophonist in chief.

“It was a surreal night,” Escott recalled. “I came out not knowing that Clinton would be there, and shortly before showtime, the Secret Service came in and started sweeping the theater. I was pretty sure this wasn’t for Jerry Lee.”

The show has evolved since its early days. Songs were added after producers got approval from the Presley and Cash estates, a sign that the musicians’ heirs liked what they’d seen.

“What surprised me about the show, and when it was in Chicago in particular, is they’ve done a lot of business with school groups, even though today’s kids haven’t heard of all of them,” Escott said. “Most of them have at least heard of Elvis, but it’s really their grandparents’ music. Yet they’re up dancing to it. They seem to relate to the simplicity and drive of this music.”

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randy.lewis@latimes.com

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‘Million Dollar Quartet’

Where: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays and 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 6.

Tickets: $20 to $82.50

Info: (714) 556-2787 or SCFTA.org

Also: Pantages Theatre, Hollywood, June 19 through July 1