Levi Kreis, Tony winner
You can see something special in Levi Kreis the moment he takes the stage as Jerry Lee Lewis in “Million Dollar Quartet.” He grabs hold of your attention and never lets go, so it’s no wonder he won the Tony for featured actor in a musical tonight. “I think the gods just smiled on me,” Kreis says. “The spirit of something just took over my head because it really is actually no work to get my hair like that.”
NEW YORK — The night the “Million Dollar Quartet” was born — Dec. 4, 1956, at Sun Studio in Memphis — will go down as one of the greatest in rock ‘n’ roll mythology.
It brought together four of rock’s founding stars — Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins — for an unguarded jam session, where musicians play together because it’s fun. Usually, those kinds of moments were left uncaptured, but that night Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Records and producer of many of rock and roll’s early hits, was there. And Phillips was way too smart not to run tape.
That fact wasn’t lost on the team behind the new Broadway musical “Million Dollar Quartet,” which opened Sunday night at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre. “It’s his story,” says the show’s director, Eric Schaeffer, who also has directed “Putting It Together” and “Glory Days” on Broadway. “Everybody thinks it’s about these four guys, but it’s really about Sam Phillips. People come expecting these great songs — and you get that — but you also get a story that’s unexpected.”
(Full story at Newsday, 4.8.2010 and the Arizona Daily Sun, 4.18.10)
