It’s just three nights after the premiere of the slick, vivacious new
Broadway musical Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but already the audience at the August Wilson Theatre on
West 52nd Street dresses like the crowds you’d see in the fifth year of Mamma Mia! Tight-fitting tops, carefully pomaded hair,
ostentatious gold neckwear … and the women look pretty gaudy too.
I mention this not because I’m a dress-code martinet , but to indicate that here was a show with an instant lock on its
market. The producers of this show about the Four Seasons—the ’60s
vocal quartet from Belleville, N.J., that sold maybe 100 million records
had quickly located that segment of the tri-state community who had
danced and romanced to songs like “Sherry” and “Dawn” and, 40 years
later, were pleased to pony up $101.25 a ticket to revisit the musical
fever of a more innocent time: theirs. The house was packed with so many
Jersey boys and girls of a certain age that we might have been at the
Meadowlands. On stage and in the orchestra seats, the mood was very B&T.
As in “bridge-and-tunnel.” That’s the phrase that snooty Manhattanites
use to describe people in the four outer boroughs and northern New
Jersey. Even if they live in New York City, they call Manhattan “the city.”
The antique but resilient notion of Manhattan’s glamorous otherness—of a WASP elite as tall, thin and gleaming as Deco skyscrapers, of an
oasis of chic, an object of pride and envy for the white ethnics living
in Brooklyn and the Bronx and Paramus and points west—has a lot to
do with a 10-block patch of midtown real estate called Broadway. That’s
where the swells dressed up for the opening night of a Gershwin show
starring Fred and Adele Astaire. The Woolworth Building, four miles down
the street, was the Cathedral of Commerce; the village of legitimate
theaters made Manhattan, for its outlying neighbors and for starstruck
folks in Iowa, the church of chic.
How long can an upmarket myth linger before tatty reality rubs it out?
The legend of old Broadway—when stories of poor boys winning the
hearts of rich girls served as metaphors for the irresistibility of
American ambition, and debonair stars introduced songs that instantly
found a spot in the everyone’s internal juke box—is a good
half-century out of date. No #1 Billboard hit has come from a Broadway
musical since Judy Collins’ “Send in the Clowns” from the Steven
Sondheim A Little Night Music in 1973. No Broadway musical has put a
bunch of its tunes on the top 40 since 1968, when “Aquarius,” “Let the Sun Shine In,” “Good Morning, Starshine,” “Easy to Be Hard” and the
title song all flowed out of Hair.
If you don’t go to a musical to hear good music that will soon be
familiar to the rest of the world, what do you go for? Good old
familiar music. Hence Jersey Boys, which recounts the career of
the ’60s vocal quartet the Four Seasons and their tenor-falsetto lead
singer Frankie Valli.
Yes, this is kind of a “legends” show, with actors pretending to be
stars singing their late great hits. Yes, it’d be better if we had
composers who could write story songs that translated into hit songs,
the way Alan Menken and Tim Rice did for a few years with the Disney
animated features that produced “A Whole New World.” But since we don’t, and haven’t for ages, we can do
worse than to honor classic pop, including the kind few people realized
was classic till now.
Once I was a youth .
Gaudio was the Seasons’ Brian Wilson: a writer-performer who defined the
group’s tight-harmony sound but soon tired of the road and stayed home
to become a full-time pop composer. The moment in Jersey Boys
where the Gaudio character hears Valli and says, “I gotta write for that
voice,” rings true. Valli, fronting the group’s tight, muscular harmony,
inspired Gaudio, often in collaboration with Crewe, to create two-minute
operas that did a lot within the restrictive pop format.
For example, instead of simply repeating the chorus, they’d use the
first line in different ways: as the first line of the verse , as the resolution of the bridge or as the entire bridge . To ramp up a song’s intensity, they’d
modulate chords like crazy. One Seasons website asserts that “Opus 17”
“ties Bobby Darin’s “Mack The Knife” for the largest number of chromatic
key changes in a Top 40 hit.” All these felicitous tricks were in the
service of songs bursting with drama and pain—stories of mismatched
love, the messy ends of affairs, the unbreachable barrier of class.
RICH AND POOR, MOM AND DAD, LOVE AND LOSS
Excuse me, you say—wha? You’ve heard most of the Seasons’ songs,
and the mood wasn’t achy-breaky; rather bold and uptempo. It’s true that
“Sherry,” the first Seasons’ hit, was a standard girl-name song with a you-look-so-fine, gonna-make-you-mine lyric.
But listen to their later, more mature work
and you’ll hear little pop poems about hard-won love lessons, wrapped in
fairly complex narratives.
