By Steven Suskin
27 Nov 2005

This week's column discusses Broadway's newest hit Jersey Boys and Allan Sherman's six-disc set of song parodies, "My Son, The Box."

JERSEY BOYS [Rhino R2 73271]
Story telling, that's the trick. Jersey Boys succeeds where other jukebox musicals have tended to fail for a simple reason: the authors and director grab us with a story about two minutes in and never let up. Yes, the songs were written long before anyone dreamed that they'd be sung by characters in a Broadway musical ago; and no, the lyrics don't necessarily dovetail nearly with the action. But the plot propels the characters — in this case, the singing group The Four Seasons — and the actors propel the songs. It all works very nicely; the first act, especially, which doesn't let up until literally exploding with "Sherry." (No, not Sheridan Whiteside of The Man Who Came to Dinner; Sherry, as in "She-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-er-y bay-ay bee.")

The new compact disc, from Rhino, compresses Jersey Boys's 33 songs into 53 minutes, with bits of dialogue interlaced in places. (The CD offers an idea of the humor of the dialogue, but the severe abridgement only hints at the craft of the book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice). Thus, we get a few montage-like tracks that serve the plot more than the music, but the meat-and-potatoes (or should it be the meatballs-and-spaghetti?) of the CD are the tracks featuring the Four Seasons sound. Bob Gaudio, the fourth Season and the principal songwriter during the glory days of the group, also produced the cast album "for Gaudio/Valli Productions." Needless to say, he knows his stuff. Jersey Boys is the first original cast album from Rhino, which specializes in nostalgia (and whose catalogue includes the original Four Seasons albums). Methinks they are going to do very nicely with this one.

The Valli in Gaudio/Valli productions is Frankie Valli, whose distinctively high pitched voice defines the sound we think of when we think of "Dawn," "Big Girls Don't Cry" and the others. John Lloyd Young re-creates Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys, and goes a long way towards propelling the show. I myself wouldn't know Frankie Valli if I stood next to him under the marquee of the August Wilson Theatre, but Young sounds pretty much like my memory of the songs. More importantly, his performance is totally convincing. Young is certainly the hardest-working person at the Wilson, unless you want to count the principal onstage drummer (who is very good and deserves a mention in the cast listing). There is something especially encouraging about watching a new musical full of actors with little or no Broadway experience, all of whom give convincing performances. Credit must go to director Des McAnuff (who does his best work here) and casting director Tara Rubin. And to Young, Christian Hoff, Daniel Reichard, J. Robert Spencer and the rest.

A somewhat disgruntled observation. Jersey Boys is labeled, in large letters on the billing page of the CD (and the theatre program), "music by Bob Gaudio" and "lyrics by Bob Crewe." I don't begrudge Gaudio his credit, as he is one of the heroes of the story and I would guess one of the driving forces in the project. But anyone sitting listening to the cast album, without the liner note booklet and a magnifying glass, might assume the billing to mean that Gaudio wrote the music for "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "I'm in the Mood for Love" and 13 other songs that parade before our ears. He didn't, of course.

The situation is more extreme with Bob Crewe, the manager/producer of The Four Seasons; his name, in those teeny-tiny credits, is on a mere seven of the thirty-three songs we hear. Yet he gets full, sole credit as lyricist. (Even with such favorable billing, the actor playing Crewe doubles in an assortment of roles. At one point in the second act, after Crewe has been firmly established as a character, this is especially awkward.) I don't begrudge Crewe his spotlight — he wrote four of the biggest hits of the evening, and was key to the group's success. But "lyrics by Bob Crewe" indicates that he wrote all the words the people sing. There are some who might say, he wrote the "big" songs like "Sherry," so what does the rest matter? Because Crewe didn't write "Sherry." Yes, all the songs are properly credited in the back of the book, as it were. But somewhere down the line, at least some younger listeners and fans of the show will understandably assume that these two guys wrote all these songs, including those by Broadway's own Dorothy Fields.

But this is all beside the point. Jersey Boys is compiled with songs from the jukebox, yes, but let's not call it a jukebox musical. A strong, canny and joyful musical, is more like it. Continued...

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