Jersey Boys – the rise and fall of a pop sensation

They were street-wise. They were cool. They were Italian. They were the Jersey Boys, four dreamers who came from the wrong side of the tracks and lived the rollercoaster American dream.

At least that’s how these cool hotshots are portrayed in Des McAnuff’s triumphant Tony Award winning celebration that opened at the Northern Jubilee Auditorium on Wednesday, Aug. 15.

Jersey Boys, a glossy musical biography of the pop group Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, is a breath of spring air into a songbook of golden pop tunes that defined a generation – songs such as Walk Like a Man, Sherry, Rag Doll and Big Girls Don’t Cry.

Their songs dominated commercial radio stations for 15 years and were copied by dance bands all across the continent. But little was known about the triumphs and tragedies in their personal lives.

Behind the frothy pop they were slick hustlers who grew up in a hard neighbourhood surrounded by Mafia gangs, high crime, booze and drugs.

These tough-talking Jersey boys were no strangers to the prison system. Yet, it was their very robust resilience that kept them climbing towards the top 40. And as Marshall Brickman and Rick Ellice’s book details, the same hustling that catapulted them to the top also pushed them in a downward spiral.

In this Broadway touring production, Nick Cosgrove, a young star in the making, plays Frankie Valli, the superstar hero whose nasal falsetto took The Four Seasons into the big time.

At last Friday night’s production, the crowd completely bought Cosgrove as Valli from his early teen years landing a spot with a band to his middle-age years when he tragically loses his daughter to a drug overdose.

His performance was so authentic the audience forgot Cosgrove wasn’t Valli. And when he sang the confection Sherry and his trademark song, the 1967 lounge ballad Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You, the crowd went wild.

But this isn’t just Cosgrove’s show. The rest of the ensemble is extremely talented and delivers a remarkable sincerity in this stretch of much-travelled highway.

First off Timothy Quinlan (Tommy DeVito), stepping in for John Gardiner, is the bad boy extraordinaire, who lands himself $160,000 in debt with the Mafia and accumulates a tax department lien of another $500,000.

It was DeVito who discovered Valli and became a self-appointed mentor. Quinlan hits a home run and plays his character with a mix of paternal wisdom, arrogant brutality and bootlicking smarminess.

Preston Truman Boyd is Gaudio, the brilliant composer who’s more comfortable behind the scenes than in the limelight. It’s his off-the-cuff, jukebox melodies that turn into a combustible mix of admiration and jealousy.

Of the entire ensemble, Boyd’s character is the most restrained yet delivers some of the snappiest lines. At one point after their huge hit Big Girls Don’t Cry, he proudly says, “Now I even have money in my pockets that doesn’t make noise.”

And then there was Michael Lomenda’s bass playing Nick, a man who gave his children to his sister so he’d have more time to “screw around.” Oddly sympathetic, Lomenda is a rich baritone – the perfect counterpoint to Cosgrove’s falsetto.

There’s no chrome plating here. Jersey Boys is a silver-lining story of an ordinary group of guys who made the most of their time in the spotlight.

With such a tight ensemble, it’s an incredibly rousing show and a sure-fire night to remember.