Do Critics Think Broadway's Ring of Fire Burns Bright?

With Ain't Misbehavin', Richard Maltby Jr. found success making a Broadway revue out of the songs of Fats Waller. Now he is revisiting that formula with Ring of Fire, a piece that utilizes the Johnny Cash song catalog. The show, which opened at the Barrymore Theatre on March 12 after a successful Buffalo tryout, features an onstage band and singers performing Cash tunes as projections create a country feel. Did critics think Ring of Fire burned brightly?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

William Stevenson in his Broadway.com Review: "The new Johnny Cash musical Ring of Fire boasts toe-tapping songs, an accomplished director in Richard Maltby Jr. Ain't Misbehavin', Fosse and a company of talented singers and musicians. But only country-music diehards are likely to have a good time at this uninspired revue. Most city slickers won't find it nearly as enjoyable or enlightening as the recent Cash biopic Walk the Line."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "If the current bio-flick Walk the Line portrays the craggy country singer as a man wrestling with demons, Ring of Fire wrestles with a really bad case of the cutes. Personally, I would always pick demons over the cutes for solid entertainment value, but you may feel different… Ring of Fire assembles a team of clean-cut, anonymously personable singers who dance, mime and, above all, smile their way through an assortment of musical numbers. And like the vocalists employed by Welk and Mitch Miller, these performers have a way of making every song, however different in essence, sound pretty much the same. Even ballads of murder and apocalypse here shade into the aural pastels associated with elevator music."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post: "Ring of Fire offers vignettes of the characters and character of the blue-collar South, some pretty effective, and almost all imaginatively presented. Luckily, most country songs--and Cash was also eclectic enough to incorporate a little rock, a lot of pure folk music and for that matter, gospel--have a theme or even narrative and this anecdotal element helps the show… The show gets an enormous boost from the excellent and evenly matched cast… Broadway theatergoers whose only acquaintance with the Grand Ole Opry comes from Robert Altman's Nashville might well be wary of walking this particular line, even if they love Cash's music as much as I do. It might seem like a country mile."

David Rooney of Variety: "Call it a Lawrence Welk Grand Ole Opry special or a non-ursine version of the Country Bears Jamboree, it's easy to throw water on Ring of Fire. But that would be unjustly dismissive of the committed performers onstage, who sing and play the hell out of an eclectic selection from the Johnny Cash songbook in this spirited tribute revue. The show's biggest problem is not its thin concept or overstretched length but its incongruousness on Broadway. It's as if a twister had lifted the production out of some red state cornfield and plunked it down on unwelcoming 47th Street… Its reliance on Michael Clark's literal-minded projections to create atmosphere-homey interiors, barrooms, railroad tracks, bland calendar vistas of farmland and countryside-make this a decidedly low-tech offering for a $100 ticket."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "The twang is appealing but the theatrics are bland in Ring of Fire, which has brought the gospel according to Johnny Cash to Broadway. We're talking about the music associated with this country legend, shoehorned into an odd little quasi-revue that doesn't quite know how to tell the singer's remarkable tale. What's on stage at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre is not a biography like the movie Walk the Line, but rather a vague, impressionistic salute to the Man in Black told through more than three dozen of the songs he performed during his long career. The result is an almost exhausting parade of numbers, delivered by a talented if generic cast and a superb collection of onstage musicians who make the most of every melody. Just looking at the hardworking fiddler, Laurie Canaan, and listening to her play will set your toes tapping."

Rob Kendt of Newsday: "If you like your country music slick and shiny, Ring of Fire, the sparkling new Broadway revue inspired by Cash's song catalogue, may be just the toe-tapping, clap-along hootenanny for you. If, on the other hand, you appreciate the darker strains that gave even Cash's corniest novelty songs an inimitable, lived-in texture--you've wandered into the wrong barn dance, partner. No mistake, director-creator Richard Maltby Jr. has done a masterful job shaping a good-time anthology from tunes written or made famous by the black-clad Arkansas troubadour with the voice-of-God baritone. And Maltby hasn't flinched from Cash's outlaw narratives or abject Christian laments so much as he's sewn them into the show's warming quilt of generic Americana… Cash stood stone-still and delivered them with the voice of a man who had hit bottom and lived to tell. The gravity-free Ring of Fire not only doesn't sound those low notes; it uses what might be called a karaoke-video aesthetic to illustrate the songs with a reductive literalness."