The cast of three men and three women sitting around a table in a spare studio on 45th Street were rehearsing for the March 8 Broadway opening of "Ring of Fire," the new show based on Johnny Cash's songs. Only on this cold January day, there wasn't going to be any music. Just reading. Richard Maltby Jr., the director and a pioneer of the popular jukebox musical, wanted to hear Mr. Cash's lyrics recited.
"Don't feel a need to get cute, or to dig for no purpose," he said, "Just let the meaning of the lines come out. There's no obligation to be interesting."
So one of the actors, Jeb Brown, started reading. Slowly and intensely, the other cast members — including the Grammy-winning country and gospel singer Lari White, and the Tony winner Jarrod Emick — joined in:
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.
I keep my eyes wide open all the time.
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds.
Because you're mine, I walk the line.
A noisy heater broke the mood. Still, the austere elegance of the language came across with precision and force. It brought to mind something that Bob Dylan wrote about "I Walk the Line" after Mr. Cash died in September 2002: Every line is "is deep and rich, awesome and mysterious all at once. Even a simple line like 'I find it very, very easy to be true' can take your measure."
Such sentiments were not initially apparent to Mr. Maltby. Although he had won Tonys for "Ain't Misbehavin,' " which was based on Fats Waller's music, and "Fosse," he wasn't at all familiar with Mr. Cash's music until the producer William Meade approached him about directing "Ring of Fire." His first response, he said, was "Why me, Lord?" He then spent days listening to Mr. Cash's songs over and over, which convinced him that the deceptively simple songs could work onstage.
Despite Mr. Cash's basic harmonies ("I'm a seventh and ninth man myself, " he said, referring to his preference for more complicated chords), he soon found the poetry in country music's unadorned clarity. "These songs are incredibly sophisticated, some of them profound," he said over a rushed meal during a rehearsal break several weeks after the table reading. "The honesty in them just startled me."
The creators decided that like Mr. Maltby's groundbreaking work on "Ain't Misbehavin'," this production would have no book and no narration, just a carefully constructed series of three dozen songs written by or associated with Mr. Cash (including the work of writers ranging from Kris Kristofferson to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails), out of which a story would unfold.
"I wanted this to be about him as a writer, not about the public story" of his troubles, Mr. Maltby said. "You kind of go into the songs and find out what life is in them, and the show begins to structure itself, and people begin to emerge from it," he explained.
Mr. Maltby, 68, feels comfortable playing around with music. His father was a bandleader and arranger who worked with Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and later Lawrence Welk.
"The nice thing about working this way," he said of his open-ended approach, "is that you don't predict what the outcome will be."
His idiosyncratic style might be identifiable to fans who know him more for his talent at puzzles than at musical theater. He has a cult following as the author of head-spinning "cryptic puzzles," sometimes published in Harper's Magazine, in which each clue is a puzzle in itself. A Manhattan resident and father of five, he often refers to the "clues," "tricks" and "deceptions" involved in assembling a show like "Ring of Fire."
The musical, for instance, starts with one of the last songs that Johnny Cash recorded and ends with one of the first. "Nobody will get that," he said, "but then again, they do feel it."
Mr. Brown, whose previous Broadway appearances include "Aida" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," said the show's early rehearsals were strikingly free-form. Presented with a script that consisted solely of song lyrics, the actors spent their days listening to Johnny Cash records, talking about the words, trying out different interpretations. "Somewhere in the third or fourth week," he said, it became clear that Mr. Maltby "had more of an overall vision, that he really did have a sense of the shape but that he didn't need to spell it out for us, and that we would work the pieces and discover the story together."
He added, "That kind of freedom can be scary, but it was very satisfying and exciting."
Such a strategy is not without risks. Creating a show around a prepackaged score is tough enough. Although Broadway has seen a few successes, like the fabulously popular "Mamma Mia!," based on Abba's music, and the more recent "Jersey Boys," based on hits by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, there are many more failures. And one of the more notorious was the musical "Lennon," which also did not have a single person playing the role of John Lennon.
The greatest challenge with a nonbook musical, said the producer Robyn Goodman, is making it seem like more than just a concert. "Audiences today are so literal, so narrative-driven," said Ms. Goodman, whose shows include "Avenue Q" and "Altar Boyz." "And with Broadway's high ticket prices, people want to feel like they saw a full show — so you have to theatricalize it, give it an underlying metaphor or a larger vision and make the songs accumulate emotionally."
But Mr. Maltby thinks producers underestimate audiences. "We've trained Broadway audiences to be clobbered over the head to get their attention," he said, "but I really do trust that they listen and think."
He was encouraged by the reviews of "Ring of Fire" after its world premiere last fall in Buffalo. Variety wrote that the audience "ate it up with a spoon, laughing and cheering throughout."
The play may also benefit from the current wave of attention generated by the movie "Walk the Line," which has five Oscar nominations and has helped propel several compilation CD's and vaulted Mr. Cash's 1997 autobiography back onto the best-seller lists.
Mr. Meade spent five years trying to persuade Mr. Cash to allow his music to be used for a stage production. Not long before he died, Mr. Cash agreed. "My father loved plays, and he'd seen many musicals," said John Carter Cash, the only child of Johnny and June Carter Cash. "He felt honored, flattered that somebody with such talent and energy wanted to do this. He was excited both by the individuals involved and the idea of it."
John Carter Cash, who plans to co-produce the soundtrack to "Ring of Fire," said he was most excited about the inclusion of some of his father's lesser-known songs. Selections like "Look at Them Beans" and "Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart" reveal how unpredictable, goofy and downright weird his writing could sometimes be.
"His writing kept going back to those really simple country images," Mr. Maltby said. "There is in that an American myth, and he lived it. It's almost archetypal, like Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan: a young man leaving home, going out in the world, getting lost, going astray, finding his way back through Jesus and the love of a good woman. It's not everybody's Johnny Cash; it might not be anybody's Johnny Cash, but it's an essence that emerges from looking at what he wrote."
