Jersey Boys, review: a Four Seasons show you can't take your eyes off
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
“When all there was was the music, that was the best,” says “Frankie Valli” in the final scenes of the enduring and much loved Four Seasons musical, as he reminisces on a career stuffed with mega-selling hits such as Walk Like a Man and Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.
He might as well have been talking about the musical itself, an award-plated success story that bagged several Tonys on Broadway in 2006 and premiered in London two years later. All jukebox musicals live or die by the quality of the back catalogue but this New Jersey quartet’s early Sixties output, much of it written by the indefatigable Bob Gaudio, is something special – song after popsicle-sweet song of doe-eyed romance, infused with finger-clicking languor and chaste sensuality, and always with an urbane sophistication that’s beguilingly at odds with the band’s blue-collar roots.
The revival of Jersey Boys, last seen in London in 2017, is part of this summer’s hard-to-criticise West End trend for transporting, commercially reliable crowd pleasers (Hair Spray; Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat; Heathers: The Musical). So what if Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice’s book is tissue-thin, despite the group’s adolescent links with the mob (all four were so often in and out of prison they would pass each other at the gates), and the hardscrabble housing scheme upbringing of the cherubic-voiced Valli (a tremendous Ben Joyce, making his professional debut).
Des McAnuff’s soft-focus production takes the grit out of all of this (even Klara Zieglerova’s industrial style set has an ersatz quality), despite flaunting itself as more than a string of greatest hits. It doesn’t help that for all the inevitable infighting and ego flare ups the four chaps themselves are resolutely ordinary – the worst rock’n’roll misdemeanour laid at founder Tommy DeVito’s door is that he liked to leave towels on hotel room floors.
Rather, Jersey Boys embodies the qualities of the band itself: unpretentious, uncomplicated, a bit cheesy and, with its by-numbers rags to riches narrative, steeped in the comforting mythology of the American dream. Moreover, you can’t fault the performances in this newly cast revival, with Benjamin Yates deftly capturing the pugilistic DeVito’s paradoxical reckless control freakery (his inveterate gambling habit would eventually split the group) and with all four band members so musically in tune one of them only needs to pluck a note on a guitar for another to instantly come in with a yearning harmony, a nifty hip wiggle, a soul-soaring melody. Best of all is Joyce, combining apple-cheeked freshness with uncanny musical instinct and with a falsetto so sublime even Valli himself, now 87, might have cause to feel envy.
This revival also marks the reopening of the Trafalgar Theatre (formerly the Trafalgar Studios), which has been lavishly restored to its 1930s art deco glory, thankfully at the expense of the previous auditorium’s vertiginous rake and less thankfully the theatre’s excellent studio space which provided a rare West End space for bold new writing. Lets hope this doesn’t augur a post-Covid West End stuffed with Jersey Boys-style nostalgia and not much else. In the meantime, though, the music’s the thing – and with beauties that include My Mother’s Eyes alongside better known hits, what music it is.
Until Jan 2. Tickets: 0844 871 7632
To book tickets, please visit Telegraph Tickets
