WORKING IN HARMONY
Jersey Boys rev up the nostalgia for music of 1960s
Jersey Boys is working its way back to us.
The hit Broadway musical about the life, times and music of the 1960s supergroup The Four Seasons will play the Conexus Arts Centre Tuesday and Wednesday.
The show, which features 33 songs from the group’s catalogue, opened on Broadway on Oct. 4, 2005, and ran until Jan. 15, racking up an impressive 4,642 performances.
The national touring productions of Jersey Boys remain so popular, the musical will reopen in a smaller, off-Broadway theatre for an open-ended run on Nov. 23.
It’s an amazing success story that began at a power lunch in Los Angeles in 2002 where the four diners had no real expectations. Two of the Seasons, Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio, agreed to have lunch with writers Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman to talk about the possibility of a musical featuring the quartet’s chart-toppers.
Elice admitted the project fell into his lap. He was working at a Hollywood film studio when a friend called to tell him he’d secured the rights to The Four Seasons’ library.
“I actually thought he meant Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. He then told me that Bob Gaudio, who’d written many of the lyrics of those vintage Four Seasons tunes, was interested in creating a musical,” said Elice, adding Mamma Mia! had just opened on Broadway and was an enormous success. “It seemed to Bob, something similar could be done with The Four Seasons songbook.”
There was one major problem — neither Elice nor Brickman had ever written a musical.
But they weren’t about to trumpet that tidbit before accepting the dinner invitation.
“I didn’t think anything would materialize from the meeting, but I really wanted to meet the guy with the phenomenal four-octave range and the guy who’d written all those incredible lyrics.”
Unbeknownst to them, Gaudio was just as leery about the meeting, but for different reasons.
“I knew the music could sell itself, but I didn’t want it to be turned into another Mamma Mia! with some silly storyline and I definitely didn’t want some Hollywood types turning us into cartoons.
“If there actually was going to be a Four Seasons musical, I wanted it to break new ground,” Gaudio recalled.
The foursome sat down and ordered their meals. To break the ice, Valli and Gaudio started telling Elice and Brickman stories about the old times, and for good reason.
Gaudio said he knew “people didn’t really know much about us. They knew our music and our songs.
“Frankie and I have plenty of stories and we started telling them. I could see their eyes widening.”
Elice admitted he was dumbfounded by all the anecdotes that tumbled from Valli and Gaudio.
“Before the salad arrived, Marshall and I knew what we’d be writing. We didn’t have to make up a story to build around the songs like they did for Mamma Mia! Frankie Valli, Bob Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi were the story,” Elice said.
Gaudio said when he and Valli left that initial meeting they knew they had a musical to showcase their songs.
“That meeting went on much longer than casual meetings are meant to and Frankie and I could see when Rick and Marshall left the restaurant they were enchanted.
“Then the phone calls started,” said Gaudio, who was living in Nashville at the time. “They kept calling to ask more questions and for clarification and I assumed they were calling Frankie in New York to do the same thing.”
Elice said he and Brickman’s biggest hurdle in creating Jersey Boys was deciding what to include and what to leave out.
“There was so much material in their lives that screamed out to be included, but it would have been a 10-hour show, and then there were the songs.
“They had 50 vintage tunes. To eliminate some, we decided to use only those which mirrored what was happening in their lives or which would help progress the story.”
Once they had a working script, Elice and Brickman contacted Des McAnuff at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego to stage the show for an October 2004 trial run.
Gaudio said he and Valli stayed away from the creative process, but still retained their veto powers, which they promised they wouldn’t use until they had seen the finished production.
Gaudio admitted he “sneaked down to San Diego a few days early just to hear the singers.”
Then came opening night. Gaudio said both he and Valli were stunned.
“The show blew us away, but what was even more remarkable was the reaction of the audience. They went wild. The reception was insane.”
Gaudio said if it had that kind of reaction in California — far from the New Jersey storyline — it would explode in New York.
But getting there wasn’t easy. “First off, they wouldn’t let us leave La Jolla. We played for four sold-out months and they only had to kick us out to bring in some college shows that had been booked way ahead.”
Producers were lined up begging to do the show in New York, but there wasn’t a single theatre available. They had to wait a year before they could open.
“That was the hardest part of the whole process,” Gaudio said.
When Jersey Boys finally did open in New York, it was, as Gaudio predicted, a smash hit. It then took London, Toronto, Australia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, Malaysia and Holland by storm and continues to open across Europe.