'Ring of Fire' Opens at Peninsula Players: Johnny Cash by the Bay
There is no better place in Wisconsin to hear "I Walk the Line" than a wooden pavilion open to the night air, with Green Bay lapping a few yards past the last row and a freight train's worth of Johnny Cash songs coming off the stage. On Wednesday, July 29, Peninsula Players Theatre opens exactly that.
"Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash" runs July 29 through Aug. 16 at the Players' open-air theater south of Fish Creek, part of the company's 91st season — a run that makes it Wisconsin's oldest professional theater. Conceived by Richard Maltby Jr., the show is less a biography than a jukebox revue: a company of actor-musicians moving through Cash's catalog — "Folsom Prison Blues," "I've Been Everywhere," "I Walk the Line," and, inevitably, "Ring of Fire" — to trace the arc of a life without anyone putting on the black suit and doing an impression. The Players' production is directed and music-directed by Dan Kazemi.
The revue format can be a trap — string the hits together, coast on nostalgia, collect the applause. What saves a good "Ring of Fire" is the band-first conceit: because the cast plays the instruments live, the show rises or falls on musicianship, not costume. Cash's songs are deceptively plain — three chords and the truth, boom-chicka-boom — and playing them well enough to hold a two-hour room is harder than it sounds. Done right, the material's plainspoken ache does the emotional work on its own.
The setting is the secret weapon. The Peninsula Players pavilion is one of the loveliest performance spaces in the Midwest, a canvas-and-timber house tucked into the cedars on the shore, where the between-scenes soundtrack is genuinely the water and the wind. Cash's songs — freight trains, prison walls, hard country miles — are built for exactly that kind of unforced, elemental setting. A slick downtown theater would flatten them. This won't.
Why it matters for the peninsula: Peninsula Players is one of the county's true anchor institutions, a professional company that has drawn destination audiences to a rural shoreline for nine decades, and a music-forward title like this is where its theater mission and the county's summer-music economy overlap most cleanly. When the Players program a jukebox musical, they're not slumming — they're betting that a resort audience will turn out for live musicianship dressed as a night at the theater. History says they're right.
The run is nearly three weeks, which for a summer resort show is a generous window — plenty of room to catch it around the wineries and the barns. Reserve ahead anyway; the shoreline pavilion is beloved and finite, and Cash still sells. Bring a jacket. The bay does not care that it's August.
Sources: Music Of Johnny Cash Coming To Players; Ring of Fire — Peninsula Players; Peninsula Players Theatre Announces the 2026 Season