Jeremy McCarter

But period flavor cuts both ways. Despite the best efforts of Danny Burstein, who got dependable laughs in The Drowsy Chaperone, the antics of fast-talking operator Luther Billis aren’t very funny. And despite O’Hara’s best efforts, the show’s vaunted wrestling match with bigotry doesn’t resonate either. There’s no denying the show’s boldness for 1949, the new seriousness it brought to musical drama on Broadway. Alas, a pioneer spirit doesn’t make the show complex or challenging enough to keep up with the racial conversation we’re having today. If it’s relevant now, it’s largely through letting us see how far our cultural depictions of American race relations have come.

The biggest surprise of Mary Poppins—I can’t believe I’m typing this—is that Disney has tried too hard to make a serious musical. The stage version delves more deeply than the film into the domestic troubles of the Banks home. This being a Disney story, you know from the start that Dad’s job anxiety and Mom’s life frustrations are just setting you up for a huggy Spielbergian finale. But what are the maniac toys from Shockheaded Peter doing marauding around the nursery, menacing little Michael and Jane? Since when does anybody care about what goes on at Dad’s looming, vaguely Masonic bank?

Not to take anything away from the actual, you know, band, but the show's charm is primarily Des McAnuff's doing. The director has no illusions about what drives this sort of show. Jersey Boys may aim only to be a shallow, big-budget, crowd-pleasing jukebox musical, but it's a model of the genre. Admire first the deftness of the storytelling by librettists Marshall Brickman (who co-wrote Annie Hall) and Rick Elice. From the hardscrabble early scenes, which mostly involve band members- rotating in and out of jail ('the Rahway Academy of the Arts,' as the scholar-in-residence DeVito puts it), the script uses a Scorsese trick to race the action along: The boys' narration propels the story by layering exposition right over the songs. Sugar and medicine are calibrated so finely that, almost before you realize it, the boys have traded their horrible clashing pink shirts for the true badge of early-sixties pop success, matching maroon blazers. Buongiorno, groupies.