The Success of Jersey Boys
December 8th, 2006Pat Craig, of InsideBayArea.com provides a detailed look at of Jersey Boys, one of the most remarkably successful musicals to come along in years. The show, about the on- and offstage lives of The Four Seasons, has been running on Broadway for more than a year, and it opens its San Francisco run on Sunday at the Curran Theatre. This article includes interviews with original Four Seasons Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio, as well as with book writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice.
Talk about opposites: The Four Seasons were blue-collar guys harmonizing and agonizing on streets of Jersey, while Brickman and Elice were cardigan-wearing, left-leaning snobs with Upper East Side ambitions. Still, there was a mutual affection between the Seasons and the authors, all of whom discovered the most difficult part of the whole arrangement was telling the truth — as lived by four different people.
The real story will be determined by those who hear it all — they decide who are the heroes and who aren’t. What was good was everybody had the opportunity to say how he saw it. Elice remarked,
A lot of the time, it was four guys with four, or more, different versions of the same event, so, in a sense, it’s something you’ve never seen on stage, where one character tells a story, then another one comes on and says, ‘No, no, that’s not the way it was. Let me tell you what really happened.
Valli and Gaudio are pleased with the diverse viewpoints on their own lives, contending that any situation experienced by more than one person would get the same sort of interpretation. Valli stated,
The real story will be determined by those who hear it all — they decide who are the heroes and who aren’t. What was good was everybody had the opportunity to say how he saw it.
