Arts & Entertainment
HP Native Performs with Elvis and Johnny Cash
Eric Stang is Jerry Lee Lewis in the rock 'n' roll musical "Million Dollar Quartet."
Eric Stang has been rehearsing for his role as Jerry Lee Lewis since he was 8 years old, when he would run down the stairs of his house, leap onto the piano bench and start playing "Great Balls of Fire."
"He’d start singing it, and then after about five seconds, he’d stand up, knock the bench over with his butt and finish the song standing up," explained his father, Mark.
Almost two decades later, the 26-year-old Highland Park native now lives in Chicago where, in addition to performing at piano bars and recording with his band, he’s acting in the understudy role of Lewis in "Million Dollar Quartet." The musical dramatizes the 1956 recording sessions that included Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Lewis. It’s been running at the Apollo Theater since 2008.
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"I saw the show close to two years ago and I enjoyed it, and I think I said to my sister, ‘I could do that,'" Stang said. "She was like, ‘No way.'"
The musician had been performing live for years, but hadn’t performed in theatre since junior high. That didn’t stop the show's producers from reaching out to him.
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"They actually called me,” Stang said. “They got my name from the piano player who was their accompanist for the auditions.”
His nay-saying sister Rebecca, 27, a DePaul law student with a theatre background, helped Stang run his lines for the audition.
“I think because he was used to being in front of a crowd, it wasn’t as much of a challenge,” she said. “He learned very quickly, I was surprised by that. He took direction well.”
Less than an hour after Stang’s audition, the part was his.
“I’ve always been able to put my personality out there in a big way on stage,” Stang said.
What helped Stang snag the part was his skill at the piano, something he's been playing since he was a child.
“He used to hide under the piano, and we had to coax him out,” said Jenny Peters, Stang’s first piano teacher and a Skokie junior high and middle school orchestra teacher.
Uninterested in reading music or playing classical tunes, Stang only crawled out from beneath the instrument when Peters let him split his time between the standards and his own compositions.
“I think that if I hadn’t been open to letting him do some of the things he wanted to do, we would have lost him and he wouldn’t have taken this talent and turned it into something so positive,” Peters said.
When Peters began taking jazz lessons, she thought of her bright, young pupil, and fed him a few jazz standards to spice up the lessons. Stang loved them, and soon started taking lessons with a jazz teacher, Steve Tschaikowsky, who taught Stang more of the jazz and blues numbers he was craving.
“He pretty much groomed me to be a professional musician,” Stang said.
At 13, Stang got his first paid performances, and a year later he was hired by Pappagallo’s in Highwood to play piano nightly. Soon after, Stang’s jazz teacher invited him to become the youngest member in his band.
As a music student at DePaul, Stang continued creating originals. He released an EP with his band, the Eric Stang Project. The band disbanded, but Stang stayed with drummer Mario Cerutti to start a new group that’s currently recording an album.
“Our goal is to be an original rock band that sounds great and sounds like it rocks, but doesn’t have a guitar,” Stang said.
He continues to do solo piano performances at Sluggers and Howl at the Moon, among other bars. To keep things interesting, Stang has also recorded with hip-hop artist Malik Yusef, and performed with him at Summerfest two years in a row, opening for Lupe Fiasco and Public Enemy.
For Stang, his understudy role in “Million Dollar Quartet” is another genre of music he can incorporate into his varied repertoire.
“My real goal is to be in an original band,” he said. “If I leave something behind as an artist, a piece of original music, that’s going to be more satisfying for me than anything else.”
"Million Dollar Quartet" runs at the Apollo Theater until May 29. Tickets range from $64.50 to $80. Click here for more information or click on the photos to the right to see our gallery of Stang performing.