Word: jerseyed
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...Start to finish, Jersey Boys is fast, fun and mostly engaging. It's awfully well cast-I liked all four faux-Seasons. As Frankie, Young hasn't the sharp angles of Valli's face, but a soft oval sweetness. His falsetto is impressive, except in a narrow stripe (three- or four-note range) where he's very thin. Granted, his voice isn't double-tracked, as Valli's often was on records, and I caught Young on a night when he'd already done a matinee. On the pristinely produced Jersey Boys original cast CD (with helpful liner notes...
...songs, was not insulated from the outside world; it was either buffeted or strengthened by it. As Dave Marsh observes in his astute liner notes for the Anthology CD, class restrictions and parental authority play a big part. The narrator in "Dawn"-he could be the kid from the Jersey streets addressing his dream girl from a Manhattan penthouse-has convinced himself that it's better to step away rather than suffer the aristocrats' condescension. The rich boy in "Rag Doll" accedes to his parents' demands that he stay away from the poor girl ("Though I love...
...creators of Jersey Boys, librettists Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice and director Des McAnuff, went for Plan C. They had two ideas for freshening the material. One was to emphasize the Seasons' Italo-American roots, especially the connection to the New Jersey mob of founder Nick DeVito; this turns the show from a simple exercise in Frankie Valli nostalgia into "The Falsetto and the Sopranos." The other was to give each member of the group weight by letting him tell part of the story. Tommy says, "You ask four guys, you get four different versions." That's Jersey Boys...
...Tommy (Christian Hoff) sets the stage by proclaiming, "Let's face it, we put Jersey on the map"-thereby ignoring, to name a few, Thomas Edison (Menlo Park), RCA Victor (Camden), the Miss America Pageant (Atlantic City) and Bruno Hauptman (Hopewell), not to mention the kid from Hoboken, Mr. Frank Sinatra, and a Newark boy whose piercing tenor preceded Valli's in the national consciousness by more than a decade, Jerry Lewis...
...Jersey Boys hews to the bio-facts, and to the notion that any story about the Italian-American working class has to be about elaborate ritual behavior and ties with the mob. As in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, the Seasons' philandering is strictly regimented; one of them says, "You had your real family and your road family." As in Scorsese's Mean Streets, four guys hang out looking for the big score, and one of them get in trouble with a don. By the end of Act I, Tommy owes a half-million dollars to various nefarious gents. Recalling their...