January 19, 2012

Sneak Peek of Metro’s Interview with Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice!

January 19th, 2012

Brickman & Elice
Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice (Photo Credit: Walter McBride)

Metro’s T. Michelle Murphy has a terrific interview with Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice, who chat about the process of co-writing the book of JERSEY BOYS. Below is a preview:

So how did this collaboration get started?

Elice: A friend of mine had the rights to the catalog of Four Seasons songs, and [he] said, ‘How would you like to write a musical about Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons?’ … I said, ‘You mean the guy with the really high voice?’ He started rattling off these songs titles, all of which I knew, but never associating them with the same group. And he sent me a compilation CD set of all their stuff. I said, ‘Marshall Brickman and I’ve been looking to write something.’ … Not only had we not worked together, but neither of us had ever written a Broadway musical. So I said, ‘Send me the songs, I’ll go over to Marshall and we’ll see what can happen.’

And I went over to Marshall’s apartment, and we went over the songs. And the early songs, the real bubblegum songs, the first flush of their success, are really similar. Over the course of the life of the group, the music begins to change [and] the arrangements become more sophisticated. There’s a style that is separate from other groups of the time. “The Four Seasons” and “The Beach Boys” were the only two American groups that survived The British Invasion in the ‘60s. And then there was one of their big hits, but it was a Frankie Valli solo song, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”

Click HERE to read the whole interview with the guys behind the JERSEY BOYS story.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. | TrackBack URI

Please leave a comment