One of the true giants of American music, Johnny Cash wasn’t just a songwriter—he was also a wildly gifted storyteller. That provided no shortage of inspiration for the musical Ring of Fire, which celebrates the Man in Black’s life in music. Six performers will dive into Cash’s greatest hits when the production plays the Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage—and while there’s dialogue, of course, the focus is on cuts from Cash’s impossibly deep catalogue.

“The question is, ‘What’s the dramatic arc?’ ” director Rachel Peake posits. “In some ways it’s set up as a reflective piece: someone at the end of their life looking back. Looking at, ‘What are the things that add up to a life?’ We had a lot of fun pulling that idea apart. It’s a theatrical concert, but it’s also not a concert, because there’s a play at the centre of it. But it’s also very music-forward for a play.”

To revisit Cash’s back catalogue—greatest hits and otherwise—is to find yourself immersed in a landscape where fledgling gunslingers end up shot down in saloons after getting their first taste of whiskey. The world of Cash can be a morally ambiguous one where characters proudly announce, “I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die.” And it’s one where you strangely sympathize with drug-addled murderers when they confess, “I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down.”

As a master class in storytelling, “A Boy Named Sue” arguably trumps all Cash classics, including “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town”, “Folsom Prison Blues”, and “Cocaine Blues”. Start with an absentee father who bails on his family early, leaving behind nothing but an empty bottle of booze, and then fast forward to a chance meeting in a rundown saloon on a street made of mud.

Chart-topping stories don’t come much more badass than a father and son beating the shit out of each other in a blind rage, blackhearted country-gold highlights including: “He come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear/Then I busted a chair right across his teeth/And we crashed through the walls and into the street/Kicking and a-gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.”

Peake knows the story of “A Boy Named Sue” well. And she’s quick to argue the song is just as timeless today as it was when recorded live by Cash during a 1969 concert for inmates at San Quentin State Prison.

“It’s storytelling, it’s mythologized, it’s theatrical—all of those things,” Peake says. “I remember driving my daughter to daycare listening to ‘A Boy Named Sue’, and how much she just loved it. She would have been three or four, and would want to listen to it again and again and again.”

Laughing, she adds, “There are things in that song that, as a parent, you could question whether or not you should let your three- or four-year-old listen to, but she loved the drama of the song.”

Named after one of Cash’s most famous songs, Ring of Fire features both hits and deep cuts, re-created for the stage—three-dozen songs bound together by snippets of narration from the cast. All performers play the singer at times, taking audiences through a life that was just as much about poverty, addiction, and dark periods as it was love, redemption, and stardom.

When Ring of Fire first hit Broadway in 2006, it was, Peake notes, a much bigger show—one that was criticized for its lack of storytelling. The musical was subsequently pared back dramatically, with that version coming to the Arts Club.

“That smaller show is normally five performers, but we bumped it up to six so there is percussion, because you can’t do Johnny Cash without the percussion,” Peake says with a laugh. “Smaller is better in this case. The intimacy of the smaller means you’re not trying to Broadway-ize it all, and that serves the material better.”

That story has no shortage of drama. As befitting a man whose favourite colour was black, Cash’s life was filled with equal parts successes and bleak periods, including drug and alcohol addictions, infidelities, and run-ins with the law that landed him overnight in jail more than once. The challenge in Ring of Fire has been to balance those down periods with a tone that celebrates an American icon.

“If people are coming to see the complete story of Johnny Cash, they might be disappointed,” Peake suggests. “This is more the dusting through the events of a life than, ‘This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.’ What we’re trying to give over to is an experience that has narrative underneath it, but isn’t tied to a linear story.”

Instead, expect more of a vibe, which includes a set that creates a world every bit as mythologized as Cash songs like “Home of the Blues” and “Hey Porter”.

“Ring of Fire moves really quickly between scenes and locations, but it also doesn’t feel like the kind of play where you want to be moving backdrops around,” Peake says. “We wanted to create a world where you could do a 90-degree turn and be in a whole different space. So we really played with the idea of Americana, and, ‘What are the things that add up to making a life?’ ”

The inspiration for that set started with Ring of Fire choreographer Nicol Spinola making a pilgrimage to Joshua Tree, where she found herself fascinated with a desert museum that made art out of junk.

“We started getting into the world of junk shops, and our set designer, Patrick Rizotti, created a world that’s a little bit like a curated junk shop,” Peake relates. “So it’s not just a bunch of junk thrown together, but more a reflection of the fact that it’s the things that we hold onto and keep that kind of add up to who we are, all seen here through the lens of Americana. It feels a bit like you’re a visitor to another time.”

A time when country music was dominated by giants like Cash, who didn’t wear black because it was fashionable, but more because he was a legitimate badass who not only had stories, but was a master at telling them. The ultimate message of Ring of Fire is, then, in some ways, as beautifully simple as Cash was complicated.

“I think the play shows that he’s endured because of that storytelling nature of his music,” Peake says. “Listen to some of his old live albums, and you get these storytime songs, and then the banter in between songs also has this storytelling quality to it. He’s not saying a lot, but he’s saying things that give you a context so that, when you go into a song, you understand it differently.”

Get ready to taste the mud and the blood and the beer. 

Ring of Fire is at the Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage from June 20 to August 11.