'Jersey Boys': Oh, what a show

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Sure, now that "Jersey Boys" has sold more than $1 billion worth of tickets, is near its sixth anniversary on Broadway and won the best-musical Tony, a show based on the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons looks like can't-miss material.

You could do worse for a score than one with mega-pop hits from the 1960s and '70s like "Sherry," "Walk Like a Man," "Big Girls Don't Cry" and "Oh What a Night."

And the gritty story of the group's troubled, working class origins — jail time and rubbing shoulders with mobsters — was a surprise to audiences.

But it didn't seem like a slam-dunk at the start. "Jersey Boys," a blue-collar story penned by two sophisticates with no experience writing musicals, arrived on Broadway in October 2005 with virtually no advance sales.

Shows built on the hit catalogs of other pop stars such as the Beach Boys ("Good Vibrations") and John Lennon ("Lennon") crashed and burned earlier that year. An Elvis musical ("All Shook Up") had just closed after six months.

It felt like critics had pulled the plug on jukebox musicals. The director and writers of "Jersey Boys" say this show, too, could have gone another way.

Co-writer Rick Elice remembers when a former advertising client approached him in 2002 with the Four Seasons song catalog.

"What was suggested, in the aftermath of 'Mamma Mia,' was a show that would be something like that," Elice said recently.

Inventing a story to fit Four Seasons lyrics, as "Mamma Mia" did with ABBA tunes, didn't interest Elice. Instead, he asked poker-playing buddy Marshall Brickman to work with him in developing an idea.

Brickman seemed an unlikely choice for the material, and he hesitated. As a musician, he had recorded folk and rockabilly. As a writer, he had won an Oscar along with Woody Allen for the urbane, head-trippy screenplay of "Annie Hall."

"Where I grew up, on the Upper West Side, Beethoven was more important than Springsteen," he said. "Four Seasons meant Vivaldi to me. I wake up screaming when I think about it now, but I told Rick I was maybe not his best bet."

Then Elice handed him a double CD of the Four Seasons' greatest hits.

"It really got me," Brickman said. "(Four Seasons singer/songwriter) Bob Gaudio had a very eclectic sense of instrumentation."

Elice says a scene from "The Deer Hunter," in which guys about to be sent to Vietnam sing along with "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You," sold Brickman, along with "Fallen Angel," about the death of Frankie Valli's daughter.

Then they sat down with Gaudio and Valli.

"They started to talk," Elice recalls, "about what it's like growing up in New Jersey, about being involved peripherally with the mob, about riding the rocket when they hit. It was fascinating stuff, something to sink our teeth into."

When the show's producer brought director Des McAnuff on board, Brickman and Elice had a treatment McAnuff describes now as "more traditional musical than what we ended up doing. It's fair to say it took some negotiating to find common ground."

McAnuff, a longtime fan of the Four Seasons, thought too much of the story had been fictionalized. He wanted to keep it as real as possible. And he wanted to see a band perform, not burst spontaneously into song.

"I gave them a visual structure," McAnuff said. "And I encouraged them to talk more to the surviving members and their manager, Bob Crewe."

That led Elice and Brickman to an approach in which each member of the quartet narrates a part of the story the way he remembers it.

"You get clashing points of view about the same history," McAnuff said. "But Gaudio says it's 90 percent of the truth."

Gaudio also says it was hard to decide whether to make the group's story so public, since parts of it are dark. Profanity and violence make this an adult show.

"How it was shaped and fashioned was entirely in their hands," Gaudio said recently of the creators, though he and Valli had veto power. "We didn't have a clue how powerful it would be when it hit the stage. We didn't want it to be a whitewash, but there were a few moments we thought better of when we saw them on paper."

Elice said the challenge was organizing an "extravagant amount of material to tell a story in two hours, knowing an hour and 15 of it is music. I don't think there's a formula you can follow."

Brickman said his strength is writing material that delivers lots of information in a short time.

"My sense of story I got from years of writing for film," he said. "And I know how to make an audience laugh." He may have gotten that as head writer for both Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" and for Dick Cavett.

McAnuff liked Elice and Brickman's idea of structuring the show in four seasons, an echo of the group's name. He made spring the birth of the group; summer the full blossoming of its success; fall the dissolution of the original quartet; and the winter of Frankie's discontent.

The show's premiere was in October 2004 at the La Jolla (Calif.) Playhouse, where McAnuff was artistic director at the time. It was an immediate smash, extending a six-week run to 3½ months.

"We were totally unprepared," Elice said. "You hope for the best, expect the worst. God bless the Internet, we had no idea how deep that subculture of Four Seasons fans penetrated."

Gaudio said he and Valli were also stunned.

"Nobody expected the runaway success it was," he said. "We took some risks, but we were thrilled. Once we made the decision to go warts and all, we didn't turn back. "

The show changed little before it opened in New York, a rarity in the evolution of a musical.

"I think it's a very seductive, magnetic concoction of mafia, rock 'n' roll, brotherhood," McAnuff said. "It has that backstage aspect. It's definitely a rags-to-riches story. But more than anything, it's something we all inevitably experience: that tension between the family you're born into and the family you choose."

Contact the writer:

402-444-1269, bob.fischbach@owh.com

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