'Million Dollar Quartet' plays a familiar tune

Look, Granny - by which, demographically, I'm afraid I mean most of us theatergoers: It's generational-jukebox time on Broadway.

Over on 47th Street, them youngins are getting all nostalgic about imitated glam-metal hits and mullet hair from the 1980s in "Rock of Ages." And now Broadway, never a business that lets redundancy get in the way of a trip home to the cash machine, reaches even further back into ancestral pop memories with "Million Dollar Quartet" - or, as no one has yet called it, "Rock of Ages: The Early Years."

The 100-minute show, which has been bouncing around the country in varying incarnations, is inspired by a now-legendary 1956 Memphis jam session with Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. This verisimilitude is meant to distinguish the event from decades of such necrophilia spectacles as "Beatlemania" - remember, "not the Beatles but an incredible simulation"?

But, really, this is little more than a glorified club act, a concert of terrific formative rock and roll loosely held together with conversational connective tissue and telescoped rock history. Considerable care has clearly been taken to cast more for sound-alikes than look-alikes, and the musicians - especially Levi Kreis as irrepressible newcomer Jerry Lee - convey the raw, rough energy of guys raised dirt-poor and riding a comet to unknowable cultural change.

The show, written by Colin Escott and creator/former director Floyd Mutrux and staged by Eric Schaffer, molds some story around Sam Phillips, the wildly influential producer who helped meld black rhythm and blues, gospel and rockabilly into a sound marketable to white people. Played tightly wound with a surprising lack of charm by Hunter Foster, Phillips is trying to keep his protégés from being sucked away from his industrial storefront studio (designed by Derek McLane) by big record labels.

Elvis (Eddie Clendening) has already left, but wanders in with his curvy girlfriend (Elizabeth Stanley), a fiction shoveled into the story to seduce a pole mike with "Fever." Perkins (Robert Britton Lyons) tries to get over having Elvis steal his hit, "Blue Suede Shoes" on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Cash (Lance Guest) luxuriates in the bass bottom of "I Walk the Line." And Phillips urges on his fine musicians: "My God, this is where the soul of music never dies."

Well, perhaps it does turn over in its grave a bit.

"Million Dollar Quartet": Nederlander Theatre, 208 W. 41st St., milliondollarquartetlive.com. Tickets: $45-$125.