Jersey Boys tells it like it is, warts and all
Jersey Boys
The Four Seasons’ hit Rag Doll went zooming round my head for days after seeing this show. That particular performance seemed to capture the essence of what made the group such a force in popular music; the polished harmony, the superbly co-ordinated precision of the choreographed presentation, and above all the distinctive falsetto range of Tim Driesen as Frankie Valli. It comes as almost a shock to realise that Valli himself just recently turned 80 and is still performing.
The show is not one of those jukebox musicals using a thin story to prop up a collection of hits. With a gutsy and witty script, it tells the story of the group from its beginnings, when some of them, especially Tommy de Vito (Stephen Webb), had trouble with the law and mob connections, something that could have scuppered their careers if it had become public knowledge.
The strength of the show is the distinctive personalities of the four performers, emphasised by the story being related from the point of view of each of them in turn: the talented singer Valli, the debt-prone and tetchy de Vito, the fastidious and lugubrious Nick Massi of Lewis Griffiths and the thoughtful composer Bob Gaudio (Sam Ferriday).
The action takes its time, giving a lot of background especially about the lives of de Vito and Valli. It took nine years for the group to have its first big hit and in the lead-up there’s a lot of arguing and rejection by producers (‘Come back to us when you’re black’) till they hit on the ideal selection of four perform-
ers, and the stage explodes into Sherry, Walk Like A Man, Big
Girls Don’t Cry and a whole array of their other big hits.
The second half in particular has a hard edge that doesn’t try to glamorise or sentimentalise relationships, when fame and money are won at the expense of home and family. It’s this hard edge that gives poignancy to the performance of Bye, Bye Baby.
The production is snappy and precise, just like the performances of the breathtakingly energetic and smartly choreographed quartet. If I have a gripe it’s the old one, that the unnecessarily loud amplification distorts the sound at times.