(no subject)
so in case you guys were interested, here's some reviews on the show "jersey boys" that's now one of the biggest hits on broadway...and my dad did all the orchestrations! here's the review - and if you like frankie valli and the four seasons, you should definitely pick up a copy of this cd - it's got "sherry baby", "big girls don't cry", "walk like a man", "can't take my eyes off of you" and other great re-orchestrated hits.
s0o0o here's the reviews - enjoy!
BROADWAY REVIEWS
From: http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/news/ny-ledesing4502260nov07,0,1806483.story
Oh, what a night: it's another fab 'Four'
BY LINDA WINER
Why does "Jersey Boys" succeed - and it does, exuberantly - when most jukebox musicals have been a pain in the Broadway butt?
For starters, the creators of the show about Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons don't just love this blue-collar DNA-pop music from the '60s. Authors Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, director Des McAnuff and choreographer Sergio Trujillo obviously also understand why they love these dopey romantic lyrics with the simple song structures, the gorgeous harmonic blends and the immaculate yet easygoing doo-wop beat.
Unlike the dim-bulb shows that use made-up stories as excuses to plug in hits by Elvis or the Beach Boys, this one is a straightforward biography of the group that defined a slick, street sound. Unlike the recent John Lennon bio, "Jersey Boys" doesn't get artsy with the material or overly selective about history. Nor is this a sanitized, glitz-revue in the tainted tradition of the long-running "Smokey Joe's Café."
Although the Seasons' story has the celebrity genre's usual rise-and-fall trajectory, there is no plane crash or drug overdose by a primary player, no victimization by the Man or The Beatles, no tumultuous trouble with strong drink and weak women.
So this is an upper kind of downer story. Each of the four guys has a chance to narrate his own idea of the glory days of falsetto-highs with "Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry," "Walk Like a Man" and "Rag Doll." The worst thing that happens involves tax evasion and gambling debts accumulated by Tommy DeVito, the hustler who found Frankie at 15 and put the group together. Besides, Christian Hoff plays him with such sweet grandiosity that, really, it is hard to process the impact of his irresponsibility.
And most of all, we always have Frankie, embodied by John Lloyd Young with unpretentious street-corner swagger and just the right nice-guy ambitions. Young also happens to have a voice that can be buzzy and rough in the middle registers and fly with the beat of pubescent hearts in falsetto.
Sure, this is clone theater, note-by-note coverage of songs that combine soapy, commercial sounds with the deep-leaning pulse of a pre-counter-cultural parallel universe in which pop groups wore suits and skinny ties and nobody discussed Vietnam.
McAnuff keeps the show from feeling animatronic. Things are pleasantly underproduced. Klara Zieglerova's set is mostly a chain fence, a metal catwalk and lots of colored lights. Occasionally, a projection of one of those ripoffs of Roy Lichtenstein cartoons will show a woman in tears - useful bits of emotional subtext for a male-driven show in which women are peripheral scolds and bimbos.
Daniel Reichard manages to be both part of the group and above it as Bob Gaudio, who knows T.S. Eliot but still writes hit songs that make "Cry" into three syllables. J. Robert Spencer brings an outsider dignity to Nick Massi, who feels like "the Ringo" of the group. Peter Gregus seems surprisingly gay for the era as producer Bob Crewe, whose contribution as lyricist is glossed over. Gangsters are credible and there is even a guy playing the real Joe Pesci.
There are a few lines - about flyovers and day jobs - that sound too contemporary. Otherwise, Brickman, screenwriter for "Annie Hall" and a head writer for Johnny Carson, makes us believe the guys are speaking for themselves. And Trujillo's choreography finds the joy in unisons of pumping elbows and snapping fingers-best of all, without a wink of parody.
From http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/30889.htm
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
We’ve had Buddy Holly, Lieber & Stoller, ABBA, Elvis, the Beach Boys and John Lennon - and now, opening last night at the August Wilson Theatre, we have a bio-musical on that resilient, all but amorphous group, the Four Seasons.
And, believe it not, it's terrific - with a young John Lloyd Young singing the bleating, stratospheric doo-wop of the hard-driving Frankie Valli in a way that rivals Frankie Valli. But that's not even the best part.
It's a Broadway commonplace that the most important thing about a musical is the book - but no one goes out singing the book, so it's a commonplace often forgotten.
Then comes a show like "Jersey Boys," with a book, by Broadway newcomers Marshall Brickman (Woody Allen's one-time co-writer) and Rick Elice, that's as tight and absorbing as an Arthur Miller play, whipped up by director Des McAnuff into a controlled rock frenzy. That's when you realize just what a book can do. A glitzy, sleight-of-hand staging never hurt, either.
The show is simply the complex story of a pop group, with its ups and downs, tensions and battles. The Four Seasons, after all, are one of the few groups that withstood the British invasion of the mid-'60s.
The story, and more especially the treatment, lends itself to the telling and the staging, which seamlessly combines the flashy elements of rock concerts with the straightforward narrative.
It's an engrossing tale of doggedly deserved blue-collar success, painted and tainted with the overtones of personal ambition, plus the occasional stealthy undertones of mob involvement. After all, we're talking New Jersey here!
The musical is helped by the Beatles-like intrigue of the four fascinating principal players.
The group's fortunes, as the show graphically depicts via Michael Clark's stylish projections of Roy Lichtenstein-style cartoons, actually followed the pattern of spring, summer, autumn and winter.
Bookwriters Brickman and Elice have taken a few poetic liberties and made some strategic omissions in tracing the group's from its Jersey street-corner aspirations to the group's 1990 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but the show holds together like glue on parchment.
And then there's the music, mostly by Bob Gaudio with lyrics by the group's main producer, Bob Crewe - such great early-'60s standards as "Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry," "Walk Like a Man" and Valli's later big solo comeback number, "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You."
The cast is plain wonderful - many of them coming from director McAnuff's original tryout of the show at his La Jolla Playhouse.
Young, as Valli, acts with the kind of conviction you'd expect from a John Turturro, and he sings his high-pitched heart out. But the other guys also score beautifully.
A slick Christian Hoff provides Tommy DeVito with all the right wiseguy attitude, and J. Robert Spencer offers a wry balance as the reserved, almost taciturn Nick Massi, who terms himself the group's Ringo.
Completing the quartet is Daniel Reichard, who, with his shy reticence, seems perfect as Bob Gaudio.
With its vibrant choreography by Sergio Trujillo, its imaginative settings by Klara Zieglerova, spot-on costumes by Jess Goldstein and arena-style lighting by Howell Binkley, "Jersey Boys" is no nostalgic stroll down rock's Memory Lane.
It's a show still dynamically alive in music while, as a drama, it catches the very texture, almost the actual smell, of its time.
From http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051107/LIFESTYLE01/511070313/1031
Jersey Boys" for any season
By JACQUES LE SOURD
THE JOURNAL NEWS
Don't count the "jukebox musical" out yet: A new one called "Jersey Boys" opened last night at the August Wilson Theatre on Broadway, and it should run for about 20 years. This time the group being celebrated is Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
One big thing this show has that others of the genre don't is a director, Des McAnuff, who puts a really stylish gloss on it. McAnuff directed "The Who's Tommy," and Billy Crystal's "700 Sundays" last season.
The other thing it has is John Lloyd Young, a singer with an astounding voice, who effortlessly imitates Valli's signature, a powerful falsetto.
The songs - and you may be amazed to realize how many hits there were, from the early '60s on - are all flawlessly delivered, without sounding canned.
"Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry" and "Walk Like a Man" were the first big three chart-toppers, but they were followed by "Dawn (Go Away)," "Rag Doll," "Oh, What a Night," "My Eyes Adored You," "Let's Hang On (To What We've Got)," "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," and "Who Loves You," among others.
"We weren't a social movement like the Beatles," says the evening's prime narrator, Bob Gaudio (Daniel Reichard). "Our fans didn't put flowers in their hair of try to levitate the Pentagon ... Our people were the guys who shipped overseas, and their sweethearts."
The book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice is a little long on narration, and you may find your eyes glazing over until the point, two-thirds of the way through the first act, when the boys break into television with an appearance on "American Bandstand." From that point on, though, you snap awake and happily ride the wave.
The scenic elements are first-rate, as you would expect in a McAnuff production, with lots of appropriate pop-art imagery, an imposing metal grid with a bridge, and real early-'60s TV cameras. The set design is by Klara Zieglerova, the costumes by Jess Goldstein and the lighting by Howell Binkley.
The show works to provide a gritty Jersey ambience as a background for the Four Seasons' rise to a dizzying success. There were some arrests for small-time crimes in the boys' early years, apparently, but you see the group gradually jell with Tommy DeVito (Christian Hoff) as its leader, who brings Frankie, Bob and Nick Massi (J. Robert Spencer) together, under the shrewd manager Bob Crewe (Peter Gregus).
Frankie was the voice, and Bob was the composer who didn't relish being onstage. Tommy was the high-living gambler who got the group into money troubles, and Nick was "the Ringo" of the group, who never felt quite accepted.
Frankie and Bob had their own partnership, it seems, and their Jersey loyalty came into play when bad-boy Tommy faced a crushing $150,000 gambling debt and various tax liens. The show is unflinching in its depiction of the group's interaction with shadowy Mafia figures - which seems normal in a post-"Sopranos" portrait of New Jersey. Mark Lotito plays one of the group's mob friends as one of the most sympathetic characters in the show.
The group evolved as time went on, of course, from its pre-Beatles start in the early '60s to the present day, when Frankie Valli - always the out-front voice - is still singing. (He lost a 22-year-old daughter to drugs but started a new family with three sons.) Choreographer Sergio Trujillo captures the exquisite, snappy moves of the time.
It's true that you may emerge a little fuzzy about the family narratives that unfold in this 40-year-story of a singing group. But no matter.
It's the music that counts, and it's sheer joy.
From: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,174755,00.html
De Niro, Pesci Turn Out for 'Jersey Boys'
By Roger Friedman
Two guys we think of as New York boys turned out for "Jersey Boys" last night on Broadway.
Robert De Niro and wife Grace Hightower came to support their buddy Joe Pesci for the opening of "Jersey Boys," the Broadway musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
De Niro was not disappointed. Neither were Joanna Gleason and Chris Sarandon, Bebe Neuwirth, actors Frank Vincent and Dennis Farina, Jimmy and Margo Nederlander and all the "Sopranos" associated with Valli, including that show's creator, David Chase, Cathy Narducci, Tony Sirico, Vincent Pastore and 'Little' Steve van Zandt with wife Maureen.
That's because "Jersey Boys" is a home run, an unqualified hit right out of the box.
A joyous, ebullient evening of songs you've known and loved, "Jersey Boys" also has a killer cast, a real book by "Annie Hall" screenwriter Marshall Brickman and terrific production.
Broadway has on its favorite thing on its hands: an overnight success. Order your tickets right now, because "Jersey Boys" is going to be sold out for some time.
The musical is the brainchild of Valli and his Four Seasons co-writer/producer Bob Gaudio. Together with producer Bob Crewe, these guys fashioned dozens of hits from "Walk Like a Man" to "Rag Doll."
Who knew they would not only hold up so well, but work so beautifully on stage? Last night, the cast of "Jersey Boys" got two standing ovations during the show ... unprecedented! I've never seen anything like it.
By just a couple of songs into the show, you could tell that stars John Lloyd Young and Christian Hoff - not to mention Daniel Reichard and J. Robert Spencer - had the audience in their control. And all of them are total Broadway newcomers. What a story!
John Lloyd Young is a 30-year-old Brown grad who's never been on Broadway. He didn't even originate the role of Frankie Valli when "Jersey Boys" debuted at the La Jolla Playhouse in California (the first Frankie blew his voice out).
Now I can tell you with certainty: Young will be nominated for, and will probably win, the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. Hoff will do the same in the supporting category, and Reichard may as well.
The reason - beside their obvious talents - is that Brickman has written a show for them with deeply fleshed-out characterizations. Even if you've never heard of the Four Seasons, by the time this show is over, you will know everything you need to know about them, and care, too.
What you probably don't know is that Pesci - the Joe Pesci from Martin Scorsese films and "My Cousin Vinny" - discovered them in New Jersey in the early '60s. He's a character in the show, played by Michael Longoria (no relation, he says, to "Desperate Housewives"' Eva).
It was Pesci who pushed the disparate guys together, helped name them and sent them on their way.
Pesci told me last night during intermission that he's a major investor in the musical, of course. That could be bad news for his fans, because the humorous character actor stands to make a fortune from "Jersey Boys." He hasn't acted in a movie since 1998.
"There was nothing I wanted to do," he told me. "But I did a little thing for De Niro here in 'The Good Shepherd.' I wanted to see if I still had it."
De Niro, who had a bodyguard in the theater, nodded in assent. He shook my hand but declined to stand. He was very, well, De Niro. Would he come to the party later?
"I have to get up and work in the morning," he said, referring to directing "The Good Shepherd." He said he was enjoying the show.
Certainly the audience was, including Paul Shaffer of the David Letterman show and Sire Records founder Seymour Stein (he inducted the Four Seasons into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the culminating episode of the musical).
Famed DJ Jerry Blavatt was there, along with teen radio idol "Cousin Brucie" Morrow and WOR's Joey Reynolds. The latter has talked about Crewe and Gaudio for years on his nightly syndicated show; it finally paid off last night.
Young told me that in order to get Valli's voice down right, he listened to Four Seasons records for three months on a loop on his Walkman.
"Then, for the last month before rehearsals, I didn't listen to any of it," he said.
He has Valli's diction down so perfectly it's scary, but his performance is not an imitation. This is not "Beatlemania."
Young is enough of himself - and so are the three other main actors - that they transcend the Four Seasons and become their own musical group. That's why the show works.
Young told me his favorite songs in the show are the lesser known "Dawn (Go Away)" and "Beggin.'"
But when Young launches the group into "Sherry," the audience went wild. The standing ovation is spontaneous and comes a little more than halfway through the first act. Even De Niro and Pesci had to join in.
And later, when the actors and the real Four Seasons took curtain calls to thunderous applause, Pesci jumped up on stage and took his well deserved bows with Longoria.
What makes "Jersey Boys" so good - aside from the music, the acting, etc. - is that unlike, say, "Lennon," the show is refreshingly honest.
All four of the group members are shown, warts and all, as bad parents, gamblers, etc. Nothing about their story is whitewashed.
The result is that we get a rare picture of real, fallible human beings whose careers skyrocketed from obscurity to international fame. The fact that they made it, and lasted, is the accomplishment. "Jersey Boys" is just the icing on the cake