Call it just a guy thing

TOWARD the end of the first act of “Jersey Boys,” the Broadway musical based on the rise and disintegration of the ‘60s pop group the Four Seasons, director Des McAnuff pulls a theatrical trick. During “Dawn,” one of more than 30 tunes gleaned for the show, the perspective suddenly shifts: Now the audience’s point of view is from backstage. With the backs of the four young actors playing Frankie Valli and the band silhouetted in the blinding stage lights, the audience gets a high-octane jolt of what it’s like to have an all-access backstage pass.

“I’m convinced that at that moment, most of the people in the audience have a real connection to that band. They feel they’re the equivalent of a manager, publicist, girlfriend, wife or whatever,” McAnuff says. “There is this reaction that has to do with feelings engendered by more than just the familiarity the audience has with these songs.”

Indeed, that backstage pass for many in the audience has turned the musical into the hottest ticket of the season. And for the group, the show has provided exposure to not only their music but to their lives, creating a new legitimacy for the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers in an international arena with a long shelf life. At any given performance at the August Wilson Theatre, where the show opened last month, it’s not unusual for the performers to be interrupted in midmonologue by applause and, at one key moment, by a standing ovation in the middle of a song.

This wasn’t supposed to happen -- certainly not to a project that had been lumped into that much-denigrated genre, the “jukebox musical.” Even its success at the La Jolla Playhouse last year, when it became the theater’s biggest hit, wasn’t able to erase the skepticism. And almost every New York critic felt compelled to review the show -- favorably or unfavorably -- in terms of the detritus of catalog musicals that had proceeded it: “All Shook Up” (Elvis), “Lennon” (John Lennon), and “Good Vibrations” (the Beach Boys).

Reflecting the majority of his peers, Bloomberg critic John Simon called “Jersey Boys” “the best jukebox or song-catalog musical so far.... Never having heard more of the group than their names, and lacking all interest in them and their music, I entered the theater a skeptic, but promptly turned believer.” Even the sour notes were grudgingly admiring, with John Lahr, in the New Yorker, praising the “rollicking direction” and “clever book” while disparaging the musical as an “ersatz event.”

Ironically, what has been overlooked in the discussion of “Jersey Boys” is that this most populist of shows has been created by a very sophisticated team, working in an art form long derided as elitist. The same could be said of “Mamma Mia!,” the global phenomenon of ABBA music created by a team of women more at home with English experimental and classic theater than the silliness of ‘70s disco queens.

In “Jersey Boys,” this meeting of unlikely worlds is most clearly demonstrated in the set, designed by Klara Zieglerova. A spare amalgam of catwalk and industrial chain link, the scenery is accented from time to time with props -- prison toilets, tables and chairs -- wheeled on and off the set by the actors. That gritty industrial picture of New Jersey is relieved on occasion by romantic comic book projections, a la Roy Lichtenstein, giving a patina of potent pop art sophistication to the simple doo-wop shenanigans.

It is this combination of pinpoint calculation and serendipity that McAnuff and co-writers Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman credit for the show’s success. The veteran director, the onetime ad agency executive and the screenwriter concede that they rarely, if ever, have given much thought to New Jersey. But nonetheless the trio shows a keen understanding of the music and culture of the Four Seasons.

The project originated with longtime friends Elice and Brickman, who found themselves at lunch a few years ago with Frankie Valli and bandmate Bob Gaudio, who wrote the group’s hits with Bob Crewe. Valli and Gaudio were intent on recycling their songs into a show like “Mamma Mia.”

But as Elice and Brickman listened to a recounting of the pop group’s history -- its Jersey mob connections, petty thief shenanigans and tempestuous interrelationships -- the writers saw something else, something they viewed as, well, Shakespearean.

“In about 20 minutes, they had gone through this kind of operatic story of their lives, which had love and hate and revenge and betrayal and crime and passion,” recalls Elice, an actor and playwright who’d also spent time working in a theatrical ad agency and as a creative consultant for Disney. “We knew that we would start with that story and figure out how the songs would serve it.”

Adds Brickman, “We didn’t want it to be ‘Mamma Mia,’ and that was the end of any discussion.” A Woody Allen collaborator who won an Oscar for co-writing “Annie Hall,” Brickman saw something else: “a guy thing” -- four classic cases of arrested development. “For 50 years, they were able to extend their adolescence,” he says. “When you’re growing up in America, it becomes a rather questionable and dangerous thing for men to express love and concern for each other, not sexual love but familial love. And when you think about the songs -- and Rick pointed this out to me -- they’re not songs guys sing to girls. They’re songs guys sing about girls to other guys.”

‘This dark underbelly’

ELICE and Brickman went to McAnuff, artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, who had worked in traditional musicals like the revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” but had also married pop music with Broadway in Roger Miller’s “Big River” and “The Who’s Tommy.”

McAnuff was skeptical until, he says, he read long interviews with Gaudio and Valli and an unpublished memoir by former group member Tommy DeVito, the scoundrel whose financial chicanery (mob loans to float his gambling, unpaid taxes) almost led to the group’s disintegration.

“As soon as I read that stuff, I knew we could achieve altitude with the songs by really embracing them and by keeping this dark underbelly going on throughout,” McAnuff says. “That is, if only we could find an effective way of telling that story. We knew it wasn’t going to be a traditional musical. It would have to be our own invention.”

From the start, songs were to be presented within a “real” context -- under street lamps, in nightclubs, in recording studios -- segueing directly in and out of scenes. That added a cinematic fluidity to the story, a nod to the impatient Brickman -- who had to be told by Elice, “Marshall, you can’t write ‘cut to’ in a play.”

One way of getting around that issue prompted the key decision to let the actors directly address the audience. The show is divided into four “movements,” with each character telling his side of the story, Rashomon-like.

“There was a potential liability to that direct address because it can get boring,” Brickman says. “But within the first 40 minutes of the show, two of them have a privileged relationship with the audience.”

The direct address and the song presentation allowed McAnuff to create tension, with the audience waiting for “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Walk Like a Man.” “It’s like pulling a slingshot back all the way and then more and more,” Brickman says. “And then when the hits do come, finally, that moment takes off like a rocket.”

That foreplay with the audience could happen only if there was chemistry in the casting, McAnuff says. And he knew he could buy time at the beginning with the seductive presence of Christian Hoff, with whom he had worked in “Tommy.” Claiming the deceptive DeVito as his part, Hoff made for a charming villain, later to be rounded out by Daniel Reichard as brainy Bob Gaudio, J. Robert Spencer as unassuming Nick Massi -- the “Ringo” of the group -- and John Lloyd Young as Frankie Castelluccio of Belleville, N.J., the future Frankie Valli.

For professional and personal reasons, David Norona, who played Valli in the La Jolla production, chose not to re-create the role on Broadway. McAnuff says he tapped Young because he nailed Valli’s exceptional singing style in auditions and because he had the acting chops to play not only the “sexually driven, ambitious, naive younger Frankie but also the Frankie who had gone through the mill, the Frankie who has real scars.”

With the exception of Gaudio -- who stuns the fledgling pop stars when they first meet by talking about T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” -- the characters are cut from the most common of cloth, the red-checked fabric of Jersey-born Italian Americans coming of age in a decade about to explode with social and political ferment that would confuse them -- if they thought about it at all.

“We’d talk ad nauseam about this, but it was really important to all of us,” McAnuff says, “that if there was one theme that runs throughout the songs, especially the early songs, like ‘Dawn,’ ‘Walk Like a Man’ and ‘Rag Doll,’ it’s the idea of the class system and its stratification at the time of the Vietnam War. This was a group that didn’t appeal to every kid on the college campus in the mid-’60s, because they were outside that liberal-to-radical movement. And it’s a point that’s made with just a succinct line in the show said by Gaudio: ‘We weren’t a social movement like the Beatles.’ ”

“That’s the moment in the show that people in the audience thank us for, that blue-collar speech,” Elice says. “Because it’s not just about the band, it’s about them. These were the guys who were shipped out. They weren’t the ones who marched on Washington.”

Reached by phone, the real Bob Gaudio concurs. “We weren’t the glamour boys of the era, not the Beatles, not the Stones, not even the Beach Boys, so this is a story that’s never been told,” he says, noting that the group finds the renewed attention “astounding.” “It is weird to see yourself up there. At times while watching the show, I’m in a kind of place of deja vu, reliving my life with a 20-minute intermission.”

Ramping up the emotional connection to the audience is what Elice calls a simple but fundamental premise. “We were telling the story of a family, and every time we got back to that construct, we got back on course,” he says. “They call each other every day, they don’t talk for years, they love each other, they hate each other. It’s one dysfunctional family, but the audience grows to accept them.”

The ups and downs of the Four Seasons family inspired McAnuff’s repeated structural directive to the writers -- “It’s three microphones going to four microphones, going to three microphones, going to two”-- reflecting the initial growth of the group and its demise.

But when the two mikes go to one, “Jersey Boys” delivers its catharsis. Part of it is the sheer anticipation of the song that signals Valli’s comeback. It took months of agitating by Valli and his cohorts to get DJs to play the song, and, in the show, McAnuff stretches the slingshot again.

But the audience is more than primed by the time the band begins to play the familiar vamp and Young launches into “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” It is at this point that a good part of the audience rises midsong and cheers lustily.

“It’s more than just nostalgia,” McAnuff says. “People have some personal memory of that song, but it’s amplified because the audience is so wrapped up in these guys. It’s that visceral joy of watching Bob and Frankie regain the altitude of stardom after all the tough times. Maybe it’s an opportunity to make up for lost time.”