IT’S A WARTS AND ALL JERSEY BOYS TRIBUTE
No schmalz in this captivating tale charting one band’s rise to fame
The Four Seasons from the State of New Jersey, was an enormously popular rock foursome during its heyday in the 1960s and into the 1970s. The four performers had a lot in common with The Beatles except they hadn’t the same glamour factor, and weren’t individually lionised in the same way, apart perhaps for Frankie Valli with his instantly recognisable falsetto style of singing that gave the group its distinctive sound.
This musical tribute has been doing the rounds for almost twenty years. It’s unusual in telling the story of the four performers in a sharp-edged style that portrays each of them in a warts-andall production that’s a long way from the schmalzy stuff that so often passes for showbiz biography. And the dialogue has all the colour of selfassured young men who weren’t too fussy about their language. The show covers their early difficulties getting exposure, the fruitless knocking on producers’ doors that produced one piece of advice telling them to ‘come back when you’re black.’
It’s performed in a series of four sections labelled spring, summer, autumn and winter, each section presented by a different singer, starting with the bad boy of the group, Tommy DeVito (Dalton Wood) who had a gift for getting into trouble with the law, that landed him in jail and threatened not just himself but the group’s existence by his enormous unpaid debts that could have put them in trouble with mob bosses. It’s a dramatic,
but pretty unpleasant portrayal.
The dialogues by Marcus Brickman and Rick Elice, that lead into all the songs, are generally witty, sharp, and to the point, giving just enough information about the performers to fill in their backgrounds and develop their characteristics and development. So we get a good insight into the serious professionalism of the pianist/composer Bob Gaudio, the undemonstrative but strongminded guitarist Nick Massi, the talented but disruptive Tommy De Vito, and the totally focused Frankie Valli (sung on opening night by Ryan Heenan) who gave the group its unique selling point.
The business of constant touring is shown as a deadly recipe for broken relationships and families, particularly for those who had young children. Nick Massi became known as Uncle Nick to cover the fact that he was a constantly absent father and Frankie
‘The business of constant touring is a deadly recipe for broken relationships’
Valli suffered his own painful problems. It’s one of the features that adds particular poignancy to his version of Bye, Bye Baby.
The second half is dramatically more satisfying than the opening section, but fans of the group get to hear vibrant renditions of almost all their top songs, among them, Rag Doll, Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You, Big Girls Don’t Cry, and Sherry belted out with energetic, but restrained choreography that keeps the emphasis on the harmony and the music. The story doesn’t avoid the inevitable end of a group that has had such success mixed with individuals who weren’t always compatible and were occasionally combustible.
The simple pragmatic set matches the rest of the production, with projections of the many venues they hit on their slow ascent to stardom, comic book style drawings from the Sixties and a scaffold-style double construction that doubles as a domestic stair and a prison landing.