Thespis Journal

With no new music composed for this production, and a seemingly endless succession of 1960’s pop tunes laced together with a partially fictionalized story Jersey Boys has a surface appearance of everything wrong with the Disneyfied wasteland that has become too routine on the boards over the last decade. Mama Mia had to be the greatest tragedy of the genre, with Good Vibrations being the greatest commercial failure. There’s little doubt that all of these shows have on things in common: high wattage is too often substituted for a good book with sing-able plot-rich melodies, and Jersey Boys is no exception in this category. The sound wattage revs up at just the right moments and repeatedly elicits thunderous applause from the mostly fifty-something’s who comprise the audience.

But, like Dreamgirls before it, there is a story in Jersey Boys, and along with riveting choreography and vintage costuming, The Boys will keep you entertained and even mesmerized for the full two hours and thirty minutes.

The story goes something like this: Frankie Castelluccio is a fifteen year old who sings like an angel. He’s living in the suburbs in New Jersey, destined to be a barber, until he meets Tommy DeVito, a savvy hustler with a guitar and a vision. Tommy’s the guy who can get Frankie out of Jersey. Nick Massi, another guy with a musical gift, joins up with them, but trios are out, quartets are in. Where’s the fourth man for the group? Little Joey Fishes (that’s Pesci—yeah, that Joe Pesci) finds him, a prodigy named Bob Gaudio; Frankie’s wife Mary tells him to spell his stage name with an “i” at the end instead of a “y” (that would be: Valli); and the neon sign of the Four Seasons Lounge gives them their new name. Gaudio writes songs and he comes up with the smash hit that will give Frankie and the boys their own distinctive sound and turn them into superstars.

After several false starts, Gaudio pens a thing that goes something like this:
She - e - e-e-e-e-ry baby (Sherry baby) She - e - rry, can you come out tonight?
The song, Sherry, produces the first thunder-clapping explosion in the house for the evening-especially for the majority of the audience who came prepared to sing along with anything that sounded remotely familiar to them.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Especially when, in Act Two, creators Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (who wrote the astonishingly strong book) and Des McAnuff (director, providing the most consistently exciting and effective staging of a Broadway musical since Bennett’s Dreamgirls) somehow work the miracle again. The group has broken up, and Frankie’s family has broken up too. Frankie’s working hard to pay off Tommy’s gambling debts, but the Four Seasons just aren’t generating the hits like they used to. Gaudio’s written him a solo number, but nobody’ll record it, nobody’ll play it, nobody wants it. But Bob and Frankie BELIEVE in it and so, wham, they finally finally get it on the radio and it goes like this”

“You’re just too good to be true. Can’t take my eyes off you…”
The crowd roars as soon as they hear the familiar melody of Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You. And when those horns come in for the chorus (just before “I love you, baby, / And if it’s quite alright, / I need you, baby, / To warm a lonely night”)—because Gaudio had promised Frankie a whole horn section back in Act One, when they were kids, dreaming of success; and now here are the horns live on stage! Well, when those horns come in, the palpable electricity in the house reaches a rolling boil.

Michael Longoria, future household name and current under-study for Tony-Award winner John Lloyd Young, was marvelous in the dazzling role of Franki Valli. Longoria barely left the stage the entire night which might explain the high absence rate of J.L. Young. Longoria sings and sings, and has to really act during the more extended book scenes in Act II. He is charming and innocent, yet believable in the tragic scenes where his daughter dies. Longoria demonstrates a full range of vivid emotions, and keeps singing and dancing with magnetic enegryfor more than two hours.

The real stars of this production however, are the other members of the four seasons. Tony Award Winner Christian Hoff, J. Robert Spencer, and Daniel Reichard give stupendous performances in roles that demand greatness. They are polished, engaging actors who sing and truly dance! WOW! These performers made the entire evening worth it. The crisp movements so highly identified with the early sounds of the 1960’s are executed to perfection by these singing actors.

With sets moving everywhere and continuously on the stage, and characters entering and exiting at a break-neck pace, there is not one dull moment in this show.

There is something about the profile of a majority of the audience members in this show. Too many of them know the songs and came to sing along. When cell phones were banned in New York, it is unfortunate that singing along was banned as well. No one paid to hear you sing the songs-Buy the CD, and sing them at home.

Finally, I must mention that Jersey Boys is a picture perfect show. Enhanced by dynamic lighting (another Tony Award for this show), there are more than a dozen moments when the stage pictures freeze for just a few fleeting moments in order to allow some much needed reflection in this fast paced show reminiscent of the jarring, flashing from scene to scene TV shows developed in the 1990’s.

Jersey Boys warrants a trip the August Wilson Theater-just don’t count on seeing the Tony Award winning actor, John Lloyd Young. Michael Longoria is great, and if you go expecting to see him, you will have a pleasant evening.

Update: You’ll love this blog!

For one thing, secretary of state is an elective office. If Democrats didn’t want Mr. Blackwell to have it, they needed to beat him. They can’t lose an election and then demand that their vanquisher curtail his own responsibilities. At least they can’t without looking absurd.

Second, the secretary of state doesn’t really run elections. That’s the job of county elections boards — which have equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. They decide how many voting machines will go where. They count the ballots.