Jersey Boys

final performance march 26th, 2017!

The story of how four blue-collar boys from the back streets of New Jersey became America's biggest pop sensation, Jersey Boys premiered on Broadway in 2005 and promptly won the Tony Award for Best Musical the following year. The quality of the storytelling (not something readily associated with jukebox musicals) should have come as no surprise given that Marshall Brickman and Rob Elice were on writing duties. Brickman is an Oscar-winning screenwriter, best known for co-writing Annie Hall and Manhattan with Woody Allen, while Elice has the phenomenally acclaimed play Peter and The Starcatcher to his name. Both were enlisted by Clint Eastwood to write the screenplay for the Jersey Boys movie.

The Broadway production is still running to this day, and in 2008, the same creative team transferred Jersey Boys across the pond. It won the Olivier Award for Best Musical the same year and is now one of the West End's unshakable mainstays.

Pulsing with the vibrant energy of the 50s and 60s, Jersey Boys trounces its contemporaries by fashioning a truly compelling and complex narrative from The Four seasons rags to riches tale. And of course, there's just the small matter of the songs as well: Sherry, Walk Like a Man, December, 1963 (Oh What A Night), Can't Take My Eyes Off You and Big Girls Don't Cry are all included.

What is Jersey Boys About?

Unlike most other jukebox musicals, Jersey Boys doesn't shoe-horn the group's songs into an invented narrative. Rather, it's a chronological retelling of the band's rise to fame, narrated by each of the four members in turn.

We begin in the late 50s, with our narrator New Jersey singer, and sometime petty criminal, Tommy Devito. He's currently playing alongside his brother Nicki and friend Nick Massi in a rock 'n' roll band named the Variety Trio. It's fair to say that they aren't having the greatest of successes. But that all changes when Devito discovers the singing talents of local boy Frankie Castelluccio (later Valli). In his high-pitched, angelic voice, Devito knows he has something special. When genius songwriter Bob Gaudio is added to the mix, the group go from playing pokey bars to topping the charts. Their new name? The Four Seasons. Not everything is rosy at the top though, with the band's troubled New Jersey past coming back to haunt them just they hit the big time...

Did you Know?

Frankie Valli doesn't just possess the voice of an angel, he has acting chops as well! Valli played the role of Rusty Millio in series five and six of New Jersey set crime saga The Sopranos.