How did four blue-collar kids become one of the greatest successes in pop music history? Find out at Broadway's runaway smash-hit, Jersey Boys. The Tony Award-winning Best Musical of the 2006 takes you up the charts, across the country and behind the music of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.
As Clive Barnes in the New York Post says, 'It's just too good to be true.' Discover the secret of a 40-year friendship: four blue-collar kids working their way from the streets of Newark to the heights of stardom. And experience electrifying performances of the golden greats that took these guys all the way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: 'Sherry,' 'Big Girls Don't Cry,' 'Can't Take My Eyes Off You,' 'Dawn,' 'My Eyes Adored You,' and more. The New York Times says, 'The crowd goes wild!'
Now a Major Motion Picture! Jersey Boys is directed by Des McAnuff, with book by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice , music by Bob Gaudio and lyrics by Bob Crewe.
This is direct, pedal-to-the-metal stuff, without nuance, irony, or wit-the sound, as the show insists, of the working people. Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice have written a clever book, which should become the template for this kind of musical excavation; it sets up the songs with well-judged humor and the elegant strokes of observation that the Four Seasons repertoire lacks. At one point, during Valli's first date with Mary (Jennifer Naimo), the baleboste who becomes his first wife, she asks why he spells his invented Italian surname with a 'y' and not an 'i.' - 'Y' is such a bullshit letter,' she says. 'It doesn?t know what it is. Is it a vowel' Is it a consonant?' 'Jersey Boys' knows exactly what it is: a money tree. The audience is tickled to death, but, given enough of these ersatz events, Broadway musical theatre may be, too.
O.K, so the book is clunky, the backstory is emotionally skeletal and the structure sticks to a generic 'VH1 Behind the Music' model, but glance around the newly rechristened August Wilson Theater during the songs in 'Jersey Boys' at the middle-age women dancing in their seats while their husbands' heads bop to the music and it's clear something is connecting. Then go dive in among the leopard-print outfits and thick 'Sopranos' accents in the lobby at intermission and it becomes even clearer. If this musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons can reach its core audience of baby boomers and partisan home-staters, it could become a sizable hit.
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