American Stage invokes the spirit – and music – of Johnny Cash

American Stage was, like so many other art-making organizations, wounded by Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ line-item veto of state grants for the upcoming season. Still, it’s business as usual at the bay area’s longest-lived professional theater company.

Opening Friday is Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash (public previews scheduled for tonight and Thursday were canceled due to weather concerns).

Created by Richard Maltby Jr., who performed a similar feat with Ain’t Misbehavin,’ a jukebox musical that constructed a loose narrative around the life and work of Fats Waller, Ring of Fire is not linear, nor is it strictly biographical. No single actor, singer or musician “plays” the country music legend – it’s more about the man’s essence, as told through the songs that he either wrote or made famous.

“He was so driven by this intersection of faith and music,” marvels director Helen R. Murray, the company’s producing artistic director. “Many people don’t realize how revolutionary he was. Look at the lyrics to ‘Man in Black,’ and you’ll see that he was so ahead of his time.

I’d love to wear a rainbow every day

And tell the world that everything’s okay

But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back

‘Til things are brighter, I’m the man in black.

“When I think about Johnny Cash,” Murray continues, “I don’t just think about ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ I think about families who sing together in a living room. On a front porch. I think about singing around a campfire. I was first introduced to Johnny Cash’s music in community, together.

“So the choice of this show was really ‘What is something that really speaks to this idea of how we are in community with one another?’ And out hope is that the audience does feel in such community with us that they sing along, clap along, stay for a post-show talkback. Stay for a post-show hootenanny, where they get to play their own instruments with our cast.”

The six-member Ring of Fire ensemble, musicians one and all, use historical narrative – and Cash’s own words – to frame the 37 songs, everything from “I Walk the Line” and “I Still Miss Someone” to “A Boy Named Sue” and even “Hurt,” the somber reflection from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor that became the last Cash hit before his death in 2003.

It’s not entirely a “greatest hits” retrospective – for every “Big River,” there’s an “Angel Band,” for every “Ring of Fire,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down” or “Jackson,” the show will toss in a gospel tune like “Waiting on the Far Side of Jordan” or a churchy singalong like “Daddy Sang Bass.”

“We forget how much Johnny Cash and June Carter actually sang church songs and things like that,” says Murray. “They had such a deep root in it. And yet they were ahead of their time – they were thinking of the future of Christianity, the future of faith.”

I wear the black for those who’ve never read

Or listened to the words that Jesus said

About the road to happiness through love and charity

Why, you’d think He’s talking straight to you and me.

“The audience,” the director suggests, “is the last piece of this puzzle. I’ve encouraged the cast to engage with the audience throughout, so there’s a lot of asides, a lot of back-and-forth. So it has that very ‘present’ feel of you are in there with them in the room, and you are part of this show.”

For more information, and tickets for Ring of Fire, click here.

Elsewhere on the American Stage agenda is the second season of “Beyond the Stage,” an effort to bring theater out of the … theater building. “We’re trying to serve our community out in the community,” Murray explains. “Meeting them where they’re at.”

The hit of 2023, an outdoor comedy called Tales By Twilight, returns to the wilds of Boyd Hill Nature Preserve in January, 2025.

Running Oct. 24-Nov. 3 at FloridaRAMA is the Murray-penned Weird in St. Pete, in which characters from local history (including writer Jack Kerouac and spontaneous combustion victim Mary Reeser) engage with the audience as they move through the venue’s gallery-like rooms.

“We’re really trying to encourage young audiences to show up, people that maybe don’t want to sit in a seat the whole time,” Murray says. “They want to walk through the environment, or they want to have something weird and wonderful about the way in which they’re taking in theater.”

On the financial side, Murray reports that the nonprofit has raised $170,000 of the $500,000 needed to save the annual big-budget production taking place each spring in Demens Landing Park. This is, she says, actually a little better than they expected as this point in the “Save Park” marathon fundraising drive.

As for the DeSantis red pen? American Stage was denied $150,000. “So now we have even more funds to make up,” Murray sighs. “We’re being mindful of that and looking at multiple possibilities.

“While it hurts, it’s not like it’s a third of our operating budget, unlike a lot of other organizations. We’re going to weather it, but it’s definitely money we have to figure out how to make up, or what are we going to cut so we don’t have to spend that money.”