After the disappointment of Clint Eastwood's bland-tasting Jersey Boys film earlier this year, what better way to cleanse the palate than with another draught of the original zesty stage show? Happily, the mega-popular musical is back on tap in Toronto, playing a short holiday-season engagement.
It's no secret that local audiences have a thing for this Tony Award-winning showbiz docudrama, directed by native son Des McAnuff – after all, it played an extended run at North York's Toronto Centre for the Arts from 2008 to 2010. And they'll find the current well-honed touring production to be just as pleasurable.
At which point I have to throw in my two cents and say that personally I've never cared much for the Jersey boys of the title, a.k.a. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. I've always found Valli's keening Jerry Lewis falsetto on their early 1960s hits to be just short of laughable, while his later ballads are the epitome of cocktail-lounge schmaltz. When record-industry characters in the show refer to one of the latter, Can't Take My Eyes Off You, as some kind of baffling art song, you do want to laugh.
Trying to put them in historical context, Jersey Boys also suggests that the Four Seasons were American rivals to the Beatles – a rivalry that in fact only existed briefly on the Top 40 charts. Where the Beatles had complexity and genius, the Four Seasons had a handful of hooky pop songs. When another character in the show compares Valli unfavourably to Neil Sedaka, it's a much more accurate assessment.
But hey, I don't want to spoil the party. And Jersey Boys is fun just on the crude level of a classic band bio, with all the typical alliances and squabbles, the crummy small-town gigs on the road to stardom, the crumbling marriages back home and – here they do share something with the Beatles – the final ugly breakup over money. Book writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice also make much of the fact that the future Four Seasons, tough Italian-American kids from weedy patches of the Garden State, spent their adolescent years dabbling in crime, so that for a while their attentions were evenly split between R&B and B&E's.
That gives the story a Sopranos flavour which was especially strong when the musical first landed on Broadway in 2005, just as the HBO series was at the height of its popularity. Brickman and Elice's salty writing also recalls Nick Tosches's brilliant Dean Martin biography, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams. And comparisons with Martin Scorsese's mob films are inevitable, too – especially since a young Joe Pesci in his pre-Goodfellas days is actually a minor character in the show (played here ingratiatingly by Jonny Wexler).
As fans know, the musical divides the band's story into four "seasons," each narrated from a different perspective by one of the four members. Act 1 gives us the viewpoints of Tommy DeVito (Nicolas Dromard), the quartet's domineering, gambling-addicted leader, and Bob Gaudio (Drew Seeley), its songwriting wunderkind. In the second act we hear from Nick Massi (Keith Hines), the group's self-described "Ringo," and finally from Valli himself (Hayden Milanes), the feisty lead singer with a castrato's vocal range and a fierce loyalty to his fellow Jersey boys.
Milanes's voice doesn't quite scale Valli's dizzying peaks in those early hits Sherry, Big Girls Don't Cry and Walk Like a Man, but he does an otherwise bang-up job of mimicking the singer's style, while growing emotionally in the role when the setbacks and tragedy of Act 2 kick in. (Note that Shaun Taylor-Corbett plays Valli at some performances.) Dromard, last seen climbing the scenery as Bert the chimney sweep in the Mirvishes's Mary Poppins a few Christmases back, grabs you by the lapels from the get-go as the cheerfully aggressive DeVito. Hines and Seeley are dead-on in their respective parts as the long-suffering Massi and the callow Gaudio. In one of the show's more amusing touches, the giddy Gaudio-penned hit December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night) is framed by a scene in which the blushing young composer finally loses his virginity.
Barry Anderson, looking like a young Mike Nichols as the band's fey, astrology-obsessed producer Bob Crewe, and a gruff Thomas Fiscella as their mobster guardian angel, both lend colour to the tale. But the script isn't much interested in the Jersey girls, except for plot purposes, and the main one, Valli's tart-tongued first wife Mary, is embodied without sympathy by an abrasive Marlana Dunn.
The musical numbers are smashing, however, and Sergio Trujillo's witty, walk-like-a-man choreography in particular is as delightful as ever. Jersey Boys may have no more depth than those ersatz Roy Lichtenstein comic-strip panels in Michael Clark's projection design, but when Frankie and the boys get to doing their thing, it's a gas, baby.
Jersey Boys runs until Jan. 4 (mirvish.com).