IN New York

I saw Million Dollar Quartet last night—the whizbang musical about the night in December 1956 when the stars aligned and Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley met (by chance) in the Sun Records studios in Memphis and jammed for the first and only time together. Great show, great performances, great tunes. I exited the Nederlander Theatre humming … the costumes. Let me explain.

I’ve had my eye on Jane Greenwood all season. As costume designer for the recently shuttered Present Laughter and A View From the Bridge, she swathed Victor Garber in luxurious silk dressing gowns in the Noël Coward comedy and transformed a very 21st-century Scarlett Johansson into a very straitlaced 1950s teen in a shirtwaist in the Arthur Miller tragedy. To complete her hat trick this season, she clothes Cash (Lance Guest) in head-to-toe black; Perkins (Robert Britton Lyons) in blue suede shoes—hey, he wrote the song; Lewis (Levi Kreis) in mismatched stripes and hillbilly suspenders; and Presley (Eddie Clendening) in draped sportcoat and slacks befitting a new prince of Hollywood (Love Me Tender had just come out). Greenwood pulls out all the stops for the finale—the best curtain call on the main stem—when she goes Vegas and gears the boys in bugle-beaded blazers: jet black for Cash, twinkly blue for Perkins, sparkly red for Lewis and Tutankhamun gold for Elvis. There ain’t nothin’ that this period-perfect designer can’t pull off.


So, where’s the Tony Award, Jane? Greenwood’s been nominated for 15 (!) but has yet to take home the prize. Scandalous. It’s about time this genius of the theatre got her just reward. Let’s start bugging the Tony Nominating Committee and then the voters.