Million Dollar Quartet to Transfer to Off-Broadway's New World Stages

Million Dollar Quartet will become the third Broadway production to transfer to off-Broadway’s New World Stages, reopening at an unspecified date in July. The Broadway production is set to close on June 12 after 34 previews and 489 regular performances at the Nederlander Theatre.

The Broadway cast currently features original stars Eddie Clendening as Elvis Presley, Lance Guest at Johnny Cash, Robert Britton Lyons as Carl Perkins and Hunter Foster as record producer Sam Phillips, with Jared Mason as Jerry Lee Lewis and Victoria Matlock as Dyanne. Casting for the off-Broadway version of the show has not been announced.

The small-scale musical, which re-creates the historic December 4, 1956, jam session between Cash, Lewis, Perkins and Presley, opened on Broadway on April 11, 2010, and was nominated for Best Musical. The show has struggled at the box office in recent months, taking in $242,786 out of a potential $1,109,700 and playing to 36.76% of capacity for the week ending June 5.

Million Dollar Quartet’s move to New World Stages follows a precedent set by Avenue Q, which transferred to the off-Broadway venue in October 2009 and is still running, and The 39 Steps, which ran there from April 2010 to January 2011. In addition, an off-Broadway production of Rent is headed to New World Stages on July 14, three years after the original ended its 12-year Broadway run.

Million Dollar Quartet is still playing at Chicago’s Apollo Theatre, where the show began life in 2008, and at the Noel Coward Theatre in London. A national tour is set to launch in October.