Word: valli
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...tune pops in my head," and eureka, it's "Sherry." The bosses don't want to record a Gaudio composition. They get it played, finally (after a buildup longer than the one for Mother Bates in Psycho), and voila, it's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," Valli's longest-lived hit and, musically, one of Gaudio's least surprising Seasons creations: standard, nicely orchestrated Europop, a plain old love song, with no grudges or class animosities. (But don't listen to me. It's among the ten most played songs of the 20th century.) Family crises become song...
...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: a Rahway Rashomon...
...since it is also broken into four seasons: Spring (the early years), Summer (the hit years), Fall (the, y' know, fall from hitmakers to nobodies) and Winter (death, the fourth season for us all, and transfiguration). Since life doesn't always accommodate melodrama, some events, like the death of Valli's daughter from a drug overdose, get pushed out of their proper time frame...
...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...
...neighborhood pal Nick (J. Robert Spencer) and looks out for a guy, one year younger, whom he calls "kid": Frankie Castelluccio (John Lloyd Young). Frankie's wife Mary (Jennifer Naimo) warns him: Mary: "With friends like these, maybe you should change your name to Sinatra." But he goes for Valli. Then Tommy's pesty friend Joe Pesci, yes, that one, hooks him up with Bob Gaudio (Daniel Reichard), a teenager who a few years before had a novelty hit called "Short Shorts." He wants music to be more than doo-wop, to have subtlety, resonance. "It's what T.S. Eliot...