December 6, 2007

The Jersey Boys’ Story According to Marshall Brickman

December 6th, 2007

SeattlePI.com’s Theater Critic Joe Adcock has an interesting interview with Jersey Boys’ co-author Marshall Brickman. According to Adcock, creating a stage musical is not, normally, hazardous. Maybe you deal with some dangerous characters. But Nazis likely are not going to come after producers of “Cabaret” or “The Sound of Music” just because those plays portray them as horrendous villains.

But the guys who wrote Jersey Boys had to watch their step. “There were phone calls,” says Marshall Brickman who, with his writing partner, Rick Elice,wrote the show’s book. “Like somebody would call and say, ‘We understand that you are writing something that includes Gyp DeCarlo. He was a relative of ours. We just want to make sure that he is shown in a favorable, respectful way.’

Jersey Boys is about the Four Seasons, a singing group that was an AM radio sensation during the 1960s. Their hits include “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man” and “Rag Doll.” The story follows the rise and fall of the Four Seasons’ career, and it has been a tremendous success. It won four Tony Awards, including best musical. It plays to capacity crowds at Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre. A touring production of the show opens Friday at the 5th Avenue Musical Theatre.

With a new degree in music from the University of Wisconsin, Marshall Brickman was, for a time, a member of a ’60s singing group called the Tarriers — very different from the Four Seasons, to be sure. The Tarriers were politically concerned folkies. Brickman also sang with John and Michelle Phillips before they morphed into the Mamas and the Papas. Now Brickman is best known as a movie writer, co-authoring scripts for “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” with Woody Allen.

But as freelance writers must, Brickman keeps many irons in the fire. Though not a playwright, he has been open to the possibility of writing for live theater. “There was this idea going around about doing a musical using Four Seasons songs,” Brickman recalled earlier this week during a phone interview from his home in Manhattan. “The thought was to do something like ‘Mama Mia,’ concoct a story into which the greatest hits could be retrofitted.

“Rick Elice and I didn’t like that idea. But we thought a story about the Four Seasons’ career would work. We went from one producer to another. No, no, we were told, no one cares about the Four Seasons anymore. Finally we talked to Michael David at Dodger Theatricals. He liked the idea. And he wanted Des McAnuff to direct.”

“It was Des’ idea to divide Jersey Boys into four seasons, spring for getting started, summer for full bloom, fall for withering and winter for ending,” Brickman says. “Each section has its own narrator — DeVito for spring, Gaudio for summer, Massi for fall and Frankie for winter. Please put that in your article. Des will like that.”

Brickman believes that Jersey Boys has been phenomenally successful partly because people who “might have been teenagers making out in the back seat of a Hudson” when the Four Seasons ruled the airwaves are now established citizens nostalgic for those days. “And they can afford theater tickets,” Brickman says.

1 Comment »

  1. >”Jersey Boys” is about the Four Seasons, a singing group that was an AM radio sensation during the 1960s. Their hits include “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man” and “Rag Doll.”

    Obviously, the author is quite young, or he would know that radio in the 1960s WAS AM. Although FM existed, few listened. The Four Seasons were A RADIO SENSATION and much more. The AM stations that played The Four Seasons were often simulcast on their coowned FM stations. Not until around 1970, when the FCC decreed that many FM stations could not simulcast, did the “Underground” formats appear on FM. The Four Seasons were too mainstream for the “Underground” FM formats, though by the mid 1970s, most “Underground” stations had evolved to “Album Rock”, playing “Who Loves You” and even “New York Street Song (No Easy Way)”. It’s great that the younger generations are now hearing many of the lesser known hits of The Four Seasons, not just the four mentioned due to Jersey Boys.

    Comment by Ted Hammond — December 8, 2007 @ 8:02 pm

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