Advertisement

‘Jersey Boys’ is coming to L.A.

Share via

A musical slot at the Ahmanson Theatre next spring will exchange a “Mountain” for a Valli without budging from the 1960s pop charts.

Center Theatre Group announced Wednesday that a touring production of “Jersey Boys,” the Broadway hit that won the Tony Award for best musical this year while tracing the career of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, will arrive in May in place of the previously announced world premiere of Berry Gordy’s Motown musical, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”

“Jersey Boys,” which premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2004, starts its national tour in December in San Francisco.

Advertisement

For “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Gordy has written a fictional period story about high school romance that blends in hit songs from the Supremes, Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye and other Motown stars.

CTG’s managing director, Charles Dillingham, said the show is being postponed because the former Motown mogul has had a harder time than he expected negotiating an extension of his rights to use the songs, which expired last month. Gordy used to own those rights himself, but from 1997 to 2004 he gradually sold Jobete Music, the 15,000-song Motown publishing catalog, to EMI for more than $300 million.

Advertisement