Mixed reviews for ‘Jersey Boys’

Variety theater critic David Rooney had this to say about “Jersey Boys,” the new musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons that opened Sunday at Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre: “The book is clunky, the backstory is emotionally skeletal and the structure sticks to a generic ‘VH1 Behind the Music’ model.”

Still, Rooney is among the many critics who are hailing “Jersey Boys” -- which had its world premiere last year at La Jolla Playhouse and is staged by Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff -- as a sure-fire audience pleaser along the lines of the Abba musical, “Mamma Mia!”

Associated Press reviewer Michael Kuchwara found details of the underdog story of the boys’ rise to fame to be “soapy,” but hailed the “unstoppable” energy of the lead performers -- Christian Hoff, Daniel Reichard, J. Robert Spencer and John Lloyd Young as Valli.

And even while dismissing “Jersey Boys” as a “shrink-wrapped musical biography,” New York Times critic Ben Brantley complimented Young’s portrayal of Valli and added: “In a year in which one pop-songbook show after another has thudded and died, ‘Jersey Boys’ passes as silver instead of the chrome-plated jukebox that it is.”