A love story with complications, in a new musical: Des McAnuff brings The Ballad of Johnny and June to the Citadel, Theater News

Christopher Ryan Grant and Patti Murin in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls,

The Ballad of Johnny and June, the musical that opens Thursday at the Citadel is a love story, with complications. And its director and co-creator Des McAnuff, pre-rehearsal last week, is hunting for the big-impact historical equivalent.

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“Johnny Cash and June Carter coming together was the equivalent of a medieval wedding,” he declares, in a first for contemporary analogy-making. “It’s Henry II marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine.”

“By the late 50s Johnny Cash was the reigning prince of country music. And June Carter was the darling of the Carter family,” giants in the history of country music as not only performers but hunters and gatherers of songs that even date back to the 19th century…. When Johnny Cash marries June Carter (in 1968), the earth shakes.”

Des McAnuff, director and co-writer of The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse production at the Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

McAnuff, a delightful conversationalist as you will glean, arrives in town with the La Jolla Playhouse production of The Ballad of Johnny and June, en route to further engagements elsewhere (New York? London?). And at his disposal in conversation — a welcome antidote the morning-after gloom of U.S. election night — is a distinguished cross-border theatre career that’s startling in its embrace. It ranges freely from La Jolla to Broadway (and hits like Big River, Jersey Boys, The Who’s Tommy, Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations), to a five-year artistic directorship of the Stratford Festival, and back. And it all starts in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, with an American-born Canadian kid who played in rock bands and at folk clubs, and wrote music (and musicals).

McAnuff’s latest, which he co-wrote with playwright Robert Cary (“a very very smart cookie … a Yale wit, with a vast general knowledge”), premiered this past summer at the La Jolla Playhouse — a regional theatre brought back to life by his artistic directorship, and one of the country’s most significant Broadway try-out houses. The Ballad of Johnny and June arrives at Edmonton’s largest playhouse, with its La Jolla cast of actor/musicians (mostly New York-based), largely through McAnuff’s connection with Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran. In this travel itinerary, it follows the trajectory of Hadestown and Six, which had developmental stops at the Citadel en route to Broadway.

Cloran was McAnuff’s assistant director on a couple of Stratford productions, Caesar and Cleopatra (starring Christopher Plummer), and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. “Daryl came to visit me in La Jolla,” recalls McAnuff. “To learn more about the mechanics of doing original work and how to get work out to other places,” a subject on which McAnuff is demonstrably a top-drawer expert. Witness the full third of La Jolla productions in his two regimes there that have been produced elsewhere, including 14 that have found their way to Broadway (with two best director Tonys for McAnuff). The international travels of Cloran’s Beatles-infused As You Like It, most recently to the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington D.C., please him enormously.

Christopher Ryan Grant in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse. Photo supplied.

The immediate inspiration for The Ballad of Johnny and June, McAnuff explains, was that “the rights to the Johnny Cash catalogue and story became available.” And John Carter Cash, the starry parents’ only son together, and a musician and biography-writer himself, “wanted a story that was authentic…. We were given no instruction about what take to have on the story. But he was very interested in us not trying to romanticize the story of his parents.”

There have been other Johnny Cash musicals, Ring of Fire on Broadway and Walk The Line on film. But they promulgated “a kind of fairy tale,” wherein June rescues Johnny from a life of dissolution. Their son “was open to having the real story told.” It’s much more complicated than the mythology, since it includes June’s denial of her own substance abuse problems.

“He was very generous about sharing stories and information with us,” says McAnuff of the son who’s captured onstage as the musician narrator (played by Van Hughes), the “balladeer” of The Ballad of Johnny and June. “One of the wonderful things was John told me that my first Broadway musical, Big River (1985), was his dad’s favourite.”

“We went to Hendersonville (Tenn.) where he still lives, we listened to all the music, we did a lot of research, and spent an incredible amount of time together to figure out what the architecture of this musical would be … all before a word was written. We’d tell the story back and forth to each other, with the song structure, and it went through several incarnations.” Readings happened, and so, two years ago, did a rather fulsome workshop in New York.

The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse production. Photo supplied.

“You go in with curiosity and hopefully a sense of wonder about what you’re going to discover,” as McAnuff puts it. What he and Cary did discover was “a story that concerns family addiction.” DNA? nature vs nurture? In any case “it’s a disease that can be passed on.” And amidst our current opioid epidemic, when street drugs are scarily more available, and cheaper, than they were in the ‘50s, there’s no arguing its topicality.

“It’s a love story with challenges,” he says of The Ballad of Johnny and June, “terrible, debilitating, and potentially fatal problems…. Which makes it an important story.” But “not a downer,” McAnuff hastens to add. “I think it’s very moving to see people who love each other getting over their deep personal problems and addictions. Ultimately, it’s uplifting. Not a drag! The irony is that the music they’re playing is so exuberant.”

“There’s something between them, something that buoys them up!”

The sheer size and range of the McAnuff career archive as playwright, director, and actor, backs him up on the declaration that that “The joyous thing about theatre is you don’t always have to play the same role. You switch hats and nobody’s terribly shocked.… I want to do it all; I’m a glutton.” He laughs. “The kind way to put it is ‘eclectic’. If you used that word in the Russian theatre it would be a curse”

He’s an artist who wears his vast cross-border experience lightly in conversation. “I never decided to become a playwright or a director. I just woke up one day, and that’s what I was doing. No life goal; it was anarchy!” By the time he’d left Toronto for New York in 1976, age 23, to research on location in Soho a piece on Phil Oakes, “I’d run a lot of laps,” as he puts it.

There are Alberta roots in the McAnuff story (his mother was born in Drumheller, a grandfather in Bowden). And there’s no shortage of Canadian theatre cred. In high school in Scarborough he’d written a musical, Urbania, “and they had the moxy to produce the thing!” instead of Mame, as planned. He’s still a bit wonderstruck by this. “It was even controversial, a gay character, armed resistance in a city of the future … a little bit Brave New World.”

Leave It To Beaver Is Dead, by the 21-year-old McAnuff, had premiered at Hart House Theatre. For Toronto Free Theatre, he’d written a score for Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a non-linear adaptation of the poetry collection, and it got done at the Folger Theatre in Washington D.C. His friends were the movers and shakers of the happening alternative Toronto theatre scene of the ‘70s, Martin Kinch, Paul Thompson among them. He lived in the same house (different floor) as playwright Carol Bolt “who took me under her wing.”

One of his most influential mentors, as McAnuff enthusiastically describes, was Michael Langham, the English-born actor/ director/ Stratford artistic director (and sometime head of New York’s Juilliard School). “A brilliant man, and and I owe him so much!”.

New York and McAnuff took to each other, and “I’ve kept a place there ever since.” He arrived with his girlfriend of the time (actor Wendel Meldrum, from Edmonton), co-founded the Dodger Theater Company, and directed their inaugural show Gimme Shelter. “I arrived in May, had my 24th birthday in June, and got my first serious job in July.” He directed The Crazy Locomotive at the Chelsea Theatre Centre, and his own play Leave It To Beaver Is Dead at the Public Theatre (with a high-powered cast that included Mandy Patinkin, Dianne Wiest, Saul Rubinek, and Maury Chaykin).   

McAnuff remembers his years leading the Stratford Festival — he left his La Jolla artistic directorship in 2008 for that prime Canadian gig — with particular fondness for the possibilities of a rep company. “I had a fantastic time,” he says. “I believe playwrights flourish when they’re produced side by side with classical plays.”

Musicals (“I love all kinds of music”) thread their way through McAnuff’s career, alongside Shakespeare, Shaw, Chekhov….  He thinks of Jersey Boys, Ain’t Too Proud, and now The Ballad of Johnny and June  as “history plays,” like the Wars of the Roses cycle of Shakespeare. And in these post-royalist times, “musicians are our kings and queens.”

“I wouldn’t be interested in creating a fictional story to go with a body of songs” à la Mamma Mia, he says. “I’m only really interested in the biography…. The jukebox thing is meaningless to me.” He grins. “If Johnny Cash and June Carter were master chefs, there would be no songs in the show. There might be chateaubriand though….

REVIEW

The Ballad of Johnny and June

Theatre: La Jolla Playhouse presented by the Citadel Theatre

Created by: Robert Cary and Des McAnuff (book), music and lyrics by Johnny Cash, June Carter, and others

Directed by: Des McAnuff

Starring: Christopher Ryan Grant, Patti Murin, Van Hughes, Gabriella Joy, Drew Wildman Foster, Bart Shatto, Correy West, Paula Leggett Chase, Maddie Shea Baldwin

Running: Thursday through Dec. 8

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com