At the end of Jersey Boys, Tommy DeVito says to the audience, “Everyone remembers it how they need to, right?” When the Tony Award-winning musical about Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons premiered on Broadway in 2005, it was among a substantial string of biographical musicals that have emerged during the first two decades of this century. There have been shows about John Lennon, Carole King, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, Donna Summer, Tina Turner, Cher and The Temptations. Only 11 Broadway shows have run longer than Jersey Boys, one of the most successful biographical musicals ever. By 2017, it grossed more than $2 billion — not bad at all considering it was a group of metropolitan San Diego investors 20 years ago (including a dentist who put up $12,500) that plugged $7.8 million into the original show so it could eventually land on Broadway.
National touring productions of Jersey Boys have come through Salt Lake City periodically and have received as much enthusiasm as experienced on Broadway. Capturing its finest distilled essence, the Pioneer Theatre Company’s (PTC) first production of Jersey Boys is an exhilarating cavalcade of pop music excellence, topped by a lead who emulates Valli’s famous falsetto voice with perfectly pitched heft and expression. Directed and choreographed by Karen Azenberg, this production pays ample artistic justice to some of American pop music’s greatest stars.
Theatrical incarnations such as Jersey Boys are not easy to pull off successfully and artistically, which is why its book creators — Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice — avoided positioning the musical exclusively on its jukebox potential when they wrote the show. The PTC production sensitively and effectively acknowledges the original distinction in heightening the realism of the actual story while allowing plenty of artistic license to flex and bend the accuracy of the group’s history— notably in how it juxtaposes two different timelines in the account. The formula evidently worked on Broadway while it did much less so in the 2014 film adaptation by Clint Eastwood.
Thus, the PTC show offers a master class in this niche genre of biographical musical. As Frankie, Trevor James, who has done two turns as the lead in regional productions and as West Side Story’s Tony on international tour, is outstanding, as are the other Four Seasons members: Bob Gaudio (played by Dayton Bloomquist), Nick Massi (Brent Thiessen) and Tommy DeVito (Adam Enrique Hollick). The first act’s string of four hits — Sherry, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Walk Like A Man and December, 1963 (Oh What A Night) — produce a giddy nostalgic high, as an example. Likewise, the choreography (with the efforts of dance captain Lenny Daniel who also plays one of the principal Genovese crime family members, Gyp DeCarlo) is as flattering as the vocal performances. One of the best examples of the footwork comes in the performance of My Boyfriend’s Back. All of it is accompanied by a first-rate 10-piece pit led by Phil Reno and a stage ensemble with 11 other actors covering various roles. For a musical with big demands on paper, PTC achieves the show’s full potential with resourceful economy, making it feel like a major touring production.
Why does Jersey Boys, a show that manifests definitively the Baudrillard concept of hyperreality, work so well on stage? In an earlier interview published elsewhere, Brickman and Elice recall a scene from the film The Deer Hunter (1978) when the guys, who are set to leave for Vietnam the next morning, are playing pool in a blue-collar bar in Pennsylvania, stop when the song Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You is on the radio and start singing the lyrics and humming the famous horn intro. “And it’s all kind of powerful, music as a socializing event in our lives. And that sort of hooked us in. And then we got to meet Bob [Gaudio] and Frankie [Valli] – which of course we did in the back of this dark restaurant on W. 46th Street [in New York City]. And we asked, innocently enough, for them to describe, while we waited for the food to come, what it was like to grow up being them.”
The show references one of its most important points when The Four Seasons’ ascending trajectory in the 1960s coincided with the ‘British Invasion’ of The Beatles. The Four Seasons’ blue-collar appeal and their songs, which grabbed the hearts of millions of teens searching endlessly for love paid big dividends. In 1964, for example, many American pop music groups struggled to compete with the British Invasion. Meanwhile, that year, The Four Seasons had three Top Five hits. It was a significant achievement, given how much coverage about the famed British quartet had inundated the American landscape. Very little had been written about The Four Seasons, who were not seen as exotic or glamorous but instead as gritty, unpolished diamonds in the rough who often did not shy away from trouble, temptation or conflict. As Elice said in the aforementioned interview, “They didn’t come from across the pond, they came from the wrong side of the river. … Now, the show [Jersey Boys] is sort of edifying for them and for guys like them.”
The show also tips its hat to the group’s longevity, by opening with a French performance of the 1975 hit December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night), set in Paris in 2000. When the song appeared on the soundtrack for the 1994 film Forrest Gump, it became the longest-charting single in history, at 50 consecutive weeks — a remarkable comeback for a song that originally spent three weeks at the top spot when it dropped nearly two decades earlier.
Valli, who was married for the fourth time just last year, is 90 and still performing. In May of this year, Valli and the group received a joint star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Billboard magazine once tagged The Four Seasons, who were formed more than 65 years ago, as the “longevity champ of the rock era,” representing only a small number of acts who have seen at least one single on the charts every decade. The splendid musicianship in the PTC production pays homage to this extraordinary longevity and the audience gave its roaring and well-deserved approval on opening night.
As for the two juxtaposed timelines in the musical’s narrative, the book represents the nuanced balancing act Brickman and Elice achieved. Valli and Gaudio essentially stepped back from the creative process, while the writers did the research but the two musicians also retained the right to kill the project if they were dissatisfied with the results. Stories about ex-wives and ex-girlfriends would likely have made even more of a dramatic punch but generally whatever Valli and Gaudio suggested for the purpose of discretion was honored. “We had to change some things at the request of Bob and Frankie – which we happily did; and in fact, I think it made it better. Everybody has an ego, and everybody has an ex-wife,” Brickman said in the previously cited interview.
Among the most notable adjustments in connecting events with songs occurs within the accelerated timeline regarding Valli’s daughter, Francine, who died of a drug overdose in 1980. Another involves the 1965 incident when The Four Seasons were arrested. It did not take place in Cleveland. Instead, the four singers were arrested in Columbus, Ohio, as they were scheduled to perform at the Ohio State Fair. However, moving it to Cleveland gave the writers the opportunity to create an impactful scene when the group was inducted 25 years later into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is located there. In these specific scenes, the PTC production finds the show’s greatest emotional impact and dramatic tension.
PTC has been nailing it recently with musicals, such as last season’s closer, Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812. This Jersey Boys production, which is the first in Utah that presents the show as it was originally penned for Broadway, continues this distinguished streak.
The show continues through Sept. 28. An exhibit, Layers of Impressions, in the Loge Gallery, comprises works from Saltgrass Printmakers, a nonprofit printmaking studio and gallery. Featured artists include Justin Diggle, Wayne Kimball and Adam Larsen. Select works will be available for purchase through the PTC Box Office. For tickets and more information, see the PTC website.