The Music Really Matters in Jersey Boys
December 20th, 2006Steven Winn of the San Francisco Chronicle highlights the incredible music of the sensational Broadway/national tour smash Jersey Boys, and the new movie Dreamgirls.
In Jersey Boys, in addition to the new flick Dreamgirls, the audience gets swept through the business of show business (new French covers, a rigged talent contest) to tap the eternal wellspring of popular music. Both these works celebrate the exhilarating joy, dizzying potential profits and self-destructive momentum of a group bent on minting its own sound. In doing so, they also transcend pop-music nostalgia to address a particular ache and a sense of absence in the culture of 2006.
According to Winn, the scores of these two musicals don’t only light up the memory banks in listeners old enough to remember the originals. For any audience member of almost any age, they ignite that feeling of what it’s like when a song spontaneously really matters, when it goes straight from a car radio grid or a friend’s bedroom stereo to the soundtrack of your own life — and when it seems to be happening to everyone else around you at the same instant.
