How did four blue-collar kids become one of the greatest successes in pop music history? Find out at Broadway's runaway smash-hit, Jersey Boys. The Tony Award-winning Best Musical of the 2006 takes you up the charts, across the country and behind the music of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.
As Clive Barnes in the New York Post says, 'It's just too good to be true.' Discover the secret of a 40-year friendship: four blue-collar kids working their way from the streets of Newark to the heights of stardom. And experience electrifying performances of the golden greats that took these guys all the way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: 'Sherry,' 'Big Girls Don't Cry,' 'Can't Take My Eyes Off You,' 'Dawn,' 'My Eyes Adored You,' and more. The New York Times says, 'The crowd goes wild!'
Now a Major Motion Picture! Jersey Boys is directed by Des McAnuff, with book by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice , music by Bob Gaudio and lyrics by Bob Crewe.
In following its working-class heroes as they climb the ladder up to fortune and fame, Boys offers a familiar blend of self-conscious populism and knee-jerk sentimentality. Luckily, co-librettists Rick Elice and veteran film and TV writer Marshall Brickman — whose previous collaborators include Woody Allen, Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett — manage to mitigate the muck with flashes of easygoing wit. Director Des McAnuff, who cut his rock 'n' roll teeth overseeing the Broadway debut of The Who's Tommy, also helps keep the proceedings brisk and breezy. Scenic designer Klara Zieglerova fashions a whimsical tone, with campy period cartoons projected on screens.
In a year in which one pop-songbook show after another has thudded and died, 'Jersey Boys,' a shrink-wrapped musical biography of the pop group the Four Seasons, passes as silver instead of as the chrome-plated jukebox that it is. Unlike the recent Broadway flops, this show has the advantage of featuring singers that actually sound like the singers they are portraying and a technology-enhanced band that approximates the original sound of their music. Scriptwriters Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice provide some likably sassy dialogue as they chart the evolution of their main characters from street kids in the urban wastelands of New Jersey to pop gods enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But while 'Jersey Boys' is based on fact, it rarely leaps over the cliches of a regulation grit-to-glamour blueprint.
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