Oh What a Night with pop masters

JERSEY BOYS

Palace, Manchester

In Manchester for a month as it begins its hotly-anticipated first British tour, this global musical phenomenon succeeds brilliantly for all kinds of reasons.

It’s about one of the vocal supergroups of the Sixties, it fills in some of the background detail on men known only hazily, but who nonetheless have a great story; it is packed with some of the great pop songs of its era, and perhaps most of all, the evening is a genuine show, with characters and a proper narrative rather than a sketchy, lazily-told bio expanded into a second-half concert of greatest hits.

Writers Marshall Brickman — Woody Allen’s collaborator on his great early comedies — and Rick Elice put the band’s story together from the individual points of view of the performers, Frankie Valli, Tommy DeVito, Nick Massi and singer-songwriter Bob Gaudio.

It’s a tale of low-grade New Jersey made-men and local mobsters, and how the four blue-collar boys escaped from a life of probable prison to one of fame — and the virtual prison of their own success.

Composers Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe — both intimately involved in the band from the early days, Gaudio as the hits writer and Crewe as producer — also add those special moments any musical needs, the tingle-down-the-spine times — in this case when we hear the original Four Seasons singing in amazing harmony on a street corner for the first time, for example; or when they belt out the newly-written “Sherry Baby” or “Big Girls Don’t Cry”.

Tensions and money eventually broke the four apart — DeVito dropped over $160,000 of the band’s cash on having a good time, and failed to pay half a million more in unpaid taxes, leaving the others to bale him out.

It’s all here, and it all flies past at a cracking pace — so much so that we rarely hear the full length of even the most famous numbers, which leaves us wanting more.

The four — Matt Corner a vocally amazing Valli, Sam Ferriday an easy-going Gaudio, Lewis Griffiths a laconic Massi and Stephen Webb an assuredly domineering DeVito — are terrific throughout, as is the band and hard-working supporting cast.

If you’re going to do a jukebox musical this, as productions around the world attest, is the way to do it, and it’s a hell of a jukebox to work with.