Quotes of the Day

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 (though I must note I was the only audience member in my field of vision who was wearing a tie), 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 (those were vinyl discs that people bought before there were CDs, kids) 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 (yout') who spent his happiest summers on the Jersey shore, singing and listening to songs very like these. And now, as a Manhattan snob, I have a message for dear old Broadway: you need shows pretty much like this one.

SEASONS IN THE SUN

Start with The Voice. The Four Seasons' sound begins with Valli, who functioned as both the lead tenor and the falsetto backup singer; he told the story and provided the color. What astonished immediately and lastingly was the power of his glass-shattering, dog-dementing falsetto (often multiplied on record by having him dupe his solos on a second track). First time around, hearing "Sherry," listeners may have thought it was a gag. Sometimes he used it for fun, in high-pitched baby talk, as George Rock's comic falsetto had for the vocal in Spike Jones' 1947 novelty hit "All I Want for Christmas (Is My Two Front Teeth)." And the reading of "bay-yay-bee" in "Sherry," offers a few seconds of comedy-record crib noise.

But Valli wasn't just kidding with his falsetto. It was not pure, not angelic, like the sweet-child voices of Brian and Carl Wilson on such Beach Boys tracks as "In My Room" and "God Only Knows." Valli's had a raspiness that gave his romantic pleas gravel, gravity, balls. This was no castrato, but a grown, yearning heterosexual male whose impossibly high voice set him apart, in tone and content, from the baritone norm, and made him perfect for all the outsider characters he would articulate in the Seasons' hits.

Behind him were three voices in the pop-R&B tradition, an octave or so below Frankie's. Usually the other guys didn't have much more to do than intone a few vowel sounds or (on "Stay") pow sounds—the oohs and ahhs of 50s doo-wop. But there was a solidity to the Seasons' backing vocals. With Valli doing all the filigree work, the other three were the long, smooth, sturdy road his falsetto danced on. Listen, for example, to "Rag Doll" (one of 51 selections on the very rich Seasons Anthology CD from Rhino Records). It begins with four bars of oohs, setting an eerie, pretty mood that won't quite reveal itself, then explodes into four bars of AHHHHHS. It's not Beethoven, but it has a pop majesty, the wordless, secular hymns of streetcorner Romeos.

Valli, though, had been singing that way, professionally, for about a decade, and the group had been together nearly that long, without getting very far. The "sound" needed songs to encase it, bring out the power and drama behind its freakishness. In the early '60s—before the blooming of the singer-songwriter, before performers were routinely called artists, before the unit of music was an album—groups relied on songwriters and producers to give them hit singles. The Drifters had Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller producing their hits, and a gang of young pros in the Brill Building (Goffin and King, Pomus and Shuman) writing them. The Seasons were lucky to align with producer Bob Crewe, who had written such hits as "Silhouettes" and "Tallahassee Lassie." They were even more fortunate that Bob Gaudio joined the Seasons in the late '50s—not as another voice, but as the group's brain and heart (Valli's being its soul).

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 ("Dawn, go away I'm no good for you"), as the resolution of the bridge ("Big girls don't cry") or as the entire bridge ("I'll go on living and keep on forgiving..." from "Ronnie"). 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." (Five, if you were wondering: from F# to G to A-flat to A to B-flat to B.) 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 (they had a lot of those) with a you-look-so-fine, gonna-make-you-mine lyric. But listen to their later, more mature (I want to say Blue Period) work and you'll hear little pop poems about hard-won love lessons, wrapped in fairly complex narratives.

The two songwriters had been there before. Gaudio was writing blame songs long before he hooked up with the Seasons. "I cried for you, now cry for me ... You made a fool of me, so now I'm leavin' you." And Crewe's "Silhouettes," written with Frank Slay, Jr., is an early rock-'n-roll story song, in which the singer pines that he's seen his girl kiss another guy behind her drawn windowshade. His furious knocks on the building's door are answered by a stranger, who "said to my shock / 'You're on the wrong block.'" Finally he rushes back to the girl he now realizes was faithful. Happy ending. Moral: Learn to trust.

Some of the best Seasons songs have the emotional sourness (Gaudio) set in a mini-play structure (Crewe). Stuff happens in these songs. Lives change with a hard word or an unspoken one. Wisdom arrives like a chill. And the wisdom is: not all endings are happy. You can't always get what you want, or what you need, either. Love is something you fall out of, like a plane without a parachute. So many of these songs are about an affair that has to end, because one of the players is tired of it or because society conspires against it.

Here are a few examples of love-affair autopsies. "Big Girls Don't Cry": guy breaks up with girl, she pretends it doesn't hurt; oh, but it does. "Walk Like a Man": girl spreads vicious rumors about guy, he's advised to walk away from her. "Dawn": poor boy selflessly tells rich girl she'd be better off with her own kind. "Rag Doll": rich boy's parents keep him from courting poor girl he loves. "Bye Bye Baby": married man won't pursue a girl he's fallen in love with. "Opus 17 (Don't You Worry 'Bout Me)": guy absolves ex-girlfriend from her guilt of marrying someone else. "Tell It to the Rain": guy feels good that his ex feels bad ("I gave you love, girl, and got nothin' in return. / How does it feel to feel what I had to learn?").

In the Seasons' oeuvre, these songs of rejection or remorse gave way to pleas, determined or desperate, for reconciliation. "Let's Hang On": the guy's fiancee wants to leave, he says stay. "Beggin'": guy regrets that he "played it hard and fast" and pleads for his girlfriend's forgiveness. "Workin' My Way Back to You": guy wants a second, maybe a last, chance to revive "the happiness that died." ("I let it get away. / Been payin' every day.") Or, in "Marlena," "Ronnie" and "Girl Come Running," the singer knows that his beloved has cheated on him, let him down, left him, but he still loves her and wants her back.

Love, in the Seasons' songs, was not insulated from the outside world; it was either buffeted or strengthened by it. As Dave Marsh observes in his astute liner notes for the Anthology CD, class restrictions and parental authority play a big part. The narrator in "Dawn"—he could be the kid from the Jersey streets addressing his dream girl from a Manhattan penthouse—has convinced himself that it's better to step away rather than suffer the aristocrats' condescension. The rich boy in "Rag Doll" accedes to his parents' demands that he stay away from the poor girl ("Though I love her so / I can't let her know"). The ambitious poor boy in "Big Man in Town" dreams of approval from the rich girl's parents ("Some day your folks will welcome me").

Even the group's early songs, the ones you sang along with but never really listened to, have parents in them. The singer in "Sherry" tells the girl, "You better ask your mama"; the one in "Big Girls Don't Cry" (kind of downer sequel to the first song) gets news about the girl's heartbreak from her mother: "Shame on you, your mama said. / Shame on you, you're cryin' in bed."

The two strands, of generation and regeneration, are twined in "Walk Like a Man." Here's the plot: The singer's girl has defamed him, and he's crushed; he needs mature, male wisdom to caulk his broken heart. In what is surely their last conversation, he tells her: "Oh, how you tried / To cut me down to sigh-yize, / Tellin' dirty lie-yies to my friends. / But my own father / Said, 'Give her up, don't bother. / The world isn't coming to an end. He said: 'Walk like a man. Talk like a man. / Walk like a man, my son / No woman's worth crawling on the earth, / So walk like a man, my son.'" This father-son speech teaches the lad that turnabout is fair play: "I'll tell the world, / 'Forget about it, girl,' / And walk like a man from you."

This section may have provided more textual and textural analysis than you absolutely required. But the songs are worth it. They're individual pictures with universal applications.

FOUR SONGS OF THE SEASONS

Sherry. In structure, there's nothing new here: a straightforwardly perky wooing song with a girl's name (cf. Randy and the Rainbows' "Denise") and a tempo close to the 1957 Maurice Williams "Stay." A boy invites a girl to "come, come, come out tonight ... to my Twist party," The percussion was the soon-to-be-familiar Seasons combination of hand-claps and marching feet that lent a military air to the enterprise. The unique element, of course, was Valli's voice, stretching two words into ten aching, urgent syllables ("Sheh-eh-eh-eh-eh-er-ry bay-yay-bee") over half of the four-line chorus. / Sheh-eh-ry, can you come out tonight?" The falsetto is used to establish the singer as the proper young gent ("You better ask your mama. / Tell her everything is all right"). Then the tenor shout in the bridge reveals him as the panting teen wolf ("With your red dress on, / Mmm, you look so fine. / Move it nice and easy. / Girl, you'll make me lose my mind"). That party he's invited her to: Twist, or twisted?

Big Girls Don't Cry. A big advance. The second song for one-hit wonders was typically a less appealing copy of the first. This one tells a story; it moves from a description of an event to a poignant revelation. The boy has told his girl their affair is over, and she takes it, so to speak, like a man: "big girls don't cry." The boy has second thoughts ("Maybe I was cruel [actually, "ca-roo-oo-ool"]/ Maybe I'm a fool") and learns from her mother that the girl was "cryin' in bed," devastated despite her stoic front. Lesson learned: "big girls do cry."

A brief, frenetic bongo riff leads to the vocal theme—each of title's four words held for a full bar—accompanied by the bass drum working out (at a much slower tempo) the immortal boom, ba-doom intro to Fats Domino's 1957 "I'm Walkin'." (The guys are singing heavenly choir, but the drums say Big Easy.) Then we're back in marching mode, with a piano and, for a few bars, a mocking trumpet. This time, all four Seasons participate in the narrative; the backing vocals don't just underline the story, they sometimes undermine it. Frankie sings, "Big girls don't cry," and the backers ask skeptically, "Who said they don't cry?" Frankie: "My girl didn't cry." The others, slyly: "I wonder why." At the end he returns to the "don't cry" theme, and they retort, "That's just an alibi."

Walk Like a Man. The bongo riffs that began "Sherry" and "Big Girls Don't Cry" give way to a fusillade of snare-drum aggression: a declaration of the war between the sexes. On his third try, Gaudio found a narrative use for the tramp-tramp-tramp beat of the first two songs: I'm gonna march right out of your heart. Valli's falsetto croons a pretty, otherworldly air while the other Seasons bark out, "Walk! Walk! Walk! Walk!" In three series of this long march (played at the beginning, middle and end, and expending more than half of the 2 minute, 15 second song), the Seasons announce themselves as the vanishing lovelorn, the French Foreign Legion of Essex County.

There's little melodic instrumentation: the guitar simply thrums on the one and three beats, and the piano plays left-hand figures, essentially functioning as a bass. It's all percussive, as in a military band. Civilian life, the arrangement says, isn't much different from the Army, and if you're lucky your Dad will be an understanding drill sergeant. The sentiments too are basic suck-it-up machismo. As in many Seasons songs, the performance here can be taken almost as a parody of the message: Walk like a man, talk like a man, but sings like Baby Snooks with a spoonful of helium. And though these aren't words I live by, I love the internal rhyme of that maxim: "No woman's worth / Crawling on the earth, / So walk like a man, my son."

Dawn. For their fifth single, the Seasons team produced a masterpiece. Anyway, their apotheosis. Since the simple days of "Sherry," Crewe and Gaudio had been listening to Phil Spector's productions for the Crystals and Ronettes; the arrangement is both burlier and more complex. The song begins with a snatch of spoken doggerel ("Pretty eyes of midsummer's morn, / They call her Dawn"). Then the drummer has a quick snit fit, and organ and chimes lead into the plaint, "Dawn, go away, I'm no good for you," as a guitar strums 2/4 Latino figures. There are six different melodic elements—hard to call anything in this song a chorus, a verse or a bridge—under the strong harmonic vocals and, of course, the marching feet.

The singer is a wonderful guy with no money and an inferiority complex the size of Idaho. "Dawn, / Go away, back where you belong. / Girl, we can't / Change the places where we were born." The rich girl is ready to go with him, but she's leading with her heart. So, like Bogart in Casablanca, he has to do the thinking for both of them. "Before you say / That you want me, / I want you to think / What your family would say. /Think / What you're throwing away. / Now think what the future would be with a poor boy like me." And back to the chorus, repeated four times as he marches slowly, backward, out of her life. "Dawn, go away, I'm no good for you"? It should be: Go away, I'm too good for you.

THE SHOW

Putting together a trunk show of hits from a composer or group is a matter of choosing from among three options: a pastiche of tunes (as in Smokey Joe's Cafe from the Mike Leiber-Jerry Stoller songbook, the Billy Joel Movin' Out or Swingin' On a Star from lyricist Jimmy McHugh); a new book that finds slots for the songs (as in the ABBA Mamma Mia!, the Elvis All Shook Up or the Gershwin's My One and Only and Crazy for You); or a bio-musical of the artist (the Buddy Holly tribute Buddy or Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave).

The creators of Jersey Boys, librettists Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice and director Des McAnuff, went for Plan C. They had two ideas for freshening the material. One was to emphasize the Seasons' Italo-American roots, especially the connection to the New Jersey mob of founder Nick DeVito; this turns the show from a simple exercise in Frankie Valli nostalgia into "The Falsetto and the Sopranos." The other was to give each member of the group weight by letting him tell part of the story. Tommy says, "You ask four guys, you get four different versions." That's Jersey Boys: a Rahway Rashomon.

Maybe this show has too many ideas, since it is also broken into four seasons: Spring (the early years), Summer (the hit years), Fall (the, y' know, fall from hitmakers to nobodies) and Winter (death, the fourth season for us all, and transfiguration). Since life doesn't always accommodate melodrama, some events, like the death of Valli's daughter from a drug overdose, get pushed out of their proper time frame.

Tommy (Christian Hoff) sets the stage by proclaiming, "Let's face it, we put Jersey on the map"—thereby ignoring, to name a few, Thomas Edison (Menlo Park), RCA Victor (Camden), the Miss America Pageant (Atlantic City) and Bruno Hauptman (Hopewell), not to mention the kid from Hoboken, Mr. Frank Sinatra, and a Newark boy whose piercing tenor preceded Valli's in the national consciousness by more than a decade, Jerry Lewis.

Tommy, when he's not doing time at Rahway Correctional Facility, sings with neighborhood pal Nick (J. Robert Spencer) and looks out for a guy, one year younger, whom he calls "kid": Frankie Castelluccio (John Lloyd Young). Frankie's wife Mary (Jennifer Naimo) warns him: Mary: "With friends like these, maybe you should change your name to Sinatra." But he goes for Valli. Then Tommy's pesty friend Joe Pesci, yes, that one, hooks him up with Bob Gaudio (Daniel Reichard), a teenager who a few years before had a novelty hit called "Short Shorts." He wants music to be more than doo-wop, to have subtlety, resonance. "It's what T.S. Eliot calls the objective correlative," he says, to which a local girl observes, "You're not from around here, are you?"

Record producer Crewe (Peter Gregus) hires the guys, but his florid style doesn't match their earth tones. After one take, he says of the harmony, "I hear it in sky blue. You're giving me brown." Tommy snaps, "That's because you're paying us shit." In desperation they look for guidance from above and see the name of the next joint they're playing, Four Seasons Lounge, in neon against the night sky. In my favorite bit of dialogue from the show, Frankie exclaims, "It's a sign!" (Given all the rim-shot repartee in this show, you'd think that the joint they'd named themselves for would be not the Four Seasons but the Ba-Da-Bing.)

Jersey Boys hews to the bio-facts, and to the notion that any story about the Italian-American working class has to be about elaborate ritual behavior and ties with the mob. As in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, the Seasons' philandering is strictly regimented; one of them says, "You had your real family and your road family." As in Scorsese's Mean Streets, four guys hang out looking for the big score, and one of them get in trouble with a don. By the end of Act I, Tommy owes a half-million dollars to various nefarious gents. Recalling their pre-star days, Tommy says, "Hey, Nick, remember when we couldn't get arrested?" Later, speaking to the audience, Nick acknowledges that "None of us were saints. You sell 100 million records, see how you handle it."

The show plays also true to the showbiz verities. Gaudio: "A tune pops in my head," and eureka, it's "Sherry." The bosses don't want to record a Gaudio composition. They get it played, finally (after a buildup longer than the one for Mother Bates in Psycho), and voila, it's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," Valli's longest-lived hit and, musically, one of Gaudio's least surprising Seasons creations: standard, nicely orchestrated Europop, a plain old love song, with no grudges or class animosities. (But don't listen to me. It's among the ten most played songs of the 20th century.) Family crises become song cues: Frankie's daughter dies of drugs, he sings "Bye Bye Baby." And at the end, the showman must go on. "I'm still out there singin'," Frankie tells us. "Like that bunny on TV with the battery, I just keep on goin'."

BYE BYE BABY

Start to finish, Jersey Boys is fast, fun and mostly engaging. It's awfully well cast—I liked all four faux-Seasons. As Frankie, Young hasn't the sharp angles of Valli's face, but a soft oval sweetness. His falsetto is impressive, except in a narrow stripe (three- or four-note range) where he's very thin. Granted, his voice isn't double-tracked, as Valli's often was on records, and I caught Young on a night when he'd already done a matinee. On the pristinely produced Jersey Boys original cast CD (with helpful liner notes by Gaudio aficionado and ex-TIME senior editor Charles Alexander), Frankie sounds better, more Valliesque. He shines particularly when singing the James Moody jazz version of "I'm in the Mood for Love"—great work, and a nice change of sonic pace.

To judge from the audience reaction that Wednesday night, Jersey Boys will run for centuries and win a lot of Tonys (Tony Danza, Tony Franciosa, Tony and Tina, Tony Soprano...). But let's be clear: it's the songs that raise the show to their level, not the other way around. The show's reproduction of the Seasons sound is quite astute; the songs sound pretty much as they did on record, except that instead of fading out they often end with a flourish; and they are played faster, as if the producers wanted to shave a few minutes off the running time, so the audience could catch an earlier PATH train back to Newark.

The show may zip theatergoers back to the '60s, but it was a different '60s. Back then, the Seasons were appreciated for catchy, danceable (or marchable) songs with tight, soaring harmonies. But the Beach Boys, on the other coast, were the preferred vocal group. As for the Seasons' lyrics, I guarantee nobody was parsing them to determine the romantic ache, handed out and absorbed, behind the perky melodies and simple rhymes. (It took the Beatles to bring together the '60s teen's high and low aspects: English lit and rock 'n' roll.)

When I was a teen—stumbling through the very obsessions, betrayals and disappointments that were the meat of the Four Seasons', er, oeuvre—I liked their songs but didn't dwell on them. It wasn't till a decade or so ago, when we were vacationing on the Caribbean island of St. Martin (whence I write this), that a Seasons tribute group did an evening of their songs. The stuff sounded richer, more mature, worth cherishing beyond its nostalgia value.

Having seen Jersey Boys, and spent the last week listening compulsively to their greatest hits album, I still think that. I'd go further and say that this music is as sharp, smart, tuneful and complex as any new Broadway scores not of the Sondheim school. I mean, better than the scores of The Producers, Hairspray, Avenue Q, Spamalot—which happen to be the last four Tony-winning musicals. Gaudio, Valli, DeVito, Massi and Crewe left a legacy of potent, sophisticated songs. Pop-classic music for all seasons.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on the Four Seasons as the group's '60s hits land on Broadway