Music does the talking
Review: A new musical tells the rollicking, warts-and-all story of the four working-class Jersey boys who became the Four Seasons.

By PAUL HODGINS
The Orange County Register

The biggest surprise of "Jersey Boys," the song-packed, enjoyable new bio-musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, lies in the discrepancy between this popular band's angelic sound and its members' gritty origins.

If Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice's script is to be believed (and I guess it should be - Valli and bandmate Bob Gaudio helped bring it to life), most of these wise guys would have ended up in prison if they hadn't struck it rich in the recording studio. And the gambling debts of Tommy DeVito, the group's mobbed-up founder and leader, almost got him whacked and nearly sank the Four Seasons at the moment they were first tasting the sweet honey of success.

In the musical's debut production at the La Jolla Playhouse, Des McAnuff directs with the panache, visual flair and keen feel for pacing that made his stagings of "Big River," "The Who's Tommy" and "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" so successful. Yet even a director with McAnuff's talents can't conceal this show's narrative shortcomings: occasional descents into working- class cliché and a second act that loses the buoyancy and tight structure of the first (unavoidable, in part, because the second half deals with the group's messy dissolution).

But fans of the Four Seasons' music will have no problem getting past such faults, because the songs themselves are terrific. Most of Gaudio's devilishly catchy hits are here - "Sherry," "Walk Like a Man," "Big Girls Don't Cry," "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" - and their delivery is impeccable. "Jersey Boys" works best, in fact, when it most resembles a Four Seasons concert.

The show's plot sometimes seems like an episode of "The Sopranos" with live music. DeVito (Christian Hoff), a working-class Joisey stiff with a penchant for crime, is slogging along with his competent but unexciting band when he meets a scrawny teen with an angel's voice. Frankie Castelluccio is allowed to sing with the group one night. His voice electrifies the room, he's an instant chick magnet, and ba-da-bing! Success, marriage and kids soon follow (and a much-needed name change, from Castelluccio to Valli).

Things don't really take off for the band, though, until a local wheeler-dealer named Joe Pesci (yes, that Joe Pesci, back in the day, when he worked as a lowly pin-setter at a bowling alley) introduces the band to Gaudio. They need each other - the group could use its own material, and Gaudio is a one-hit wonder ("Who Wears Short Shorts," written when he was 15) fearful that he's a has-been, even though he's still in his teens. DeVito is doubtful, but Gaudio sits at the piano, and ba-da-bing No. 2! The group's distinctive vocal and instrumental blend is instantly born. After many false starts they find the right name for themselves, and their sound is perfected thanks to a producer so, um, flamboyant that he makes Liberace look like John Ashcroft.

Writers Brickman and Elice insist that they gave each surviving band member's version of events equal due, but things seem more than a bit skewed against Tommy DeVito. As his spiraling debt and abrasive personalitythreaten to sink the quartet, we learn more and more unsavory things about him. Bass player Hank, Tommy's roommate on the road, delivers the capper: he uses every towel in the bathroom, doesn't change his underwear and - ugh! - urinates in the sink. Talk about your tell-all tales.

Such sour grapes, and some sordid sexual escapades, give "Jersey Boys" a warts-and-all quality that may be off-putting to some. But it's hard to hate a show with this much good music - or this many spot-on performances.

As Valli, David Noroņa delivers the kind of portrayal that makes you wonder if anybody else should even bother trying to play the role. He does an uncanny job of re-creating Valli's unforgettable falsetto, and he looks remarkably like the singer, but his Valli is much more than mere imitation. Noroņa changes his body language and energy level as Valli ages and life's slings and arrows begin to wear down his seemingly indestructible optimism.

Hoff's Tommy is almost as good. He's small but menacing - a little ball of hate - yet Hoff captures the raffish charm that must have been Tommy's best quality. Daniel Reichard gives Bob Gaudio a nerdy but lovable persona; there's a tentativeness to the actor's approach that seems right for a man who never wanted to be in the spotlight. And he's fun to listen to: Aside from Noroņa, Reichard owns the cast's best voice. Joe Payne hints at a troubled complexity but not much else as laconic bass player Hank, the most underwritten major role.

Klara Zieglerova's sets beautifully capture the industrial bleakness of northern New Jersey, and she contributes the evening's most inventive joke (it has to do with how the band finally decides on its name). Zieglerova sets the tone for a staging that's rich in visual effects but not overwhelmed by them. There's clever use of '60s TV cameras and Roy Lichtenstein-style projections that dramatize and comment on the story's high points.

Lichtenstein,of course, was appropriating the images of '60s pop culture to make larger statements. "Jersey Boys" uses the same material, but with much less ambition. It's hard-nosed and unsentimental, sure, but ultimately more values-affirming than groundbreaking. Near the end, Valli grouses about the Four Seasons' nemesis, the British Invasion, reminding us that, unlike the Beatles and their ilk, he and his band mates weren't trying to change the world, just have some fun. "Jersey Boys," for better or worse, has similarly modest aims.