Sunderland Empire – until 2 April 2022
4****
“Oh What a NIght!” – It’s easy to see why Jersey Boys is such an award winning and popular musical. It’s a feel good night out and jam packed with more than 30 hits and as you sit back and listen it’s easy to forget just how many top songs this quartet produced over the years. Seeing this musical for the first time you may be fooled into thinking you’re unfamiliar with the songs, but once you hear them, they are all recognisable.
Telling the story of the Four Seasons, each band member gets a season to tell his tale. But as they say in the show “take four different men and you’ll get four different versions”. It turns out there was a lot more to the group than close vocal harmonies and hit records, their colourful story – of ducking and diving, wise guys and hustles, failed relationships, rows, retribution and eventual redemption – makes this a jukebox musical with a real story to tell.
Cleverly the show is split into the four seasons – Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, giving each band member a chance to tell the audience their side of the story; all of them working their way into the audience’s affections. Regardless of their various differences, we know and care about Bob Gaudio, Tony DeVito, Nick Massi and Frankie Valli, and it’s that which gives their song lyrics extra resonance.
We start with Tommy DeVito (Dalton Wood) and Spring. DeVito, a petty criminal, with a criminal record a mile long, but with a musical talent and a dream to escape. He put together a band with his brother Nick and Nick Massi (Lewis Griffiths) and gave Francis Castelluccio the big break that turned him into Frankie Valli (Michael Pickering and Luke Suri on alternate dates). With a few stints in prison, and brother Nick not coming out of jail for a long time, the band begins.
With the joining of Bob Gaudio (Blair Gibson) and the name The Four Seasons taken from the local bowling alley, the band hits big and Bob gives us his Summer.
A chance meeting with Bob Crew (Michael Levi) gives them the recording contract they desire and with Gaudio’s writing talent a slew of hits appear from Sherrie, to our first ovation of the night Walk Like A Man. But as the hits keep coming DeVito’s spending gets worse and by the end of the first half the boys are in a million dollars worth of debt to the tax and the Mob.
Nick Massi’s Fall comes next. Lewis Griffiths must be able to act the role in his sleep, having done it so many times before. But long may it reign, Massi is the quiet member of the band, big on harmonies and Griffiths has a lovely deep vibrancy in his vocals. We are then followed by Valli’s winter including the tragic death of his daughter.
But the hits continue and the second ovation is for Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You, the song none of the record producers wanted to touch but was a huge commercial success.
It’s a bittersweet story. Valli’s immediately recognisable distinctive voice gives rise to some amazing vocals during the show.
It would be all too easy to put this show on the road as another jukebox musical, a limp through the history of a household name, but the narrative is as strong as the score and really packs a punch in the emotional moments. Klara Zieglerova’s restrained design, a framework of scaffolding encloses the action. At the back of the stage, huge Roy Lichtenstein-style cartoons show comic-strip girls with ponytails, huge tears and speech bubbles, while against the oranges and reds of what seems to be a perpetual sunset is an industrial silhouette of chimneys and pylons.
The band is led by Griff Johnson with Ed Hewlett, Tara Litvack,Craig Oxley, Marcus Pritchard and Stephen Fawbert on a motorised drum set that travels the stage.
In Sunderland until 2 April and then on tour. This is a show not to be missed