Word: valli
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...just three nights after the premiere of the slick, vivacious new Broadway musical Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but already the audience at the August Wilson Theatre on West 52nd Street dresses like the crowds you'd see in the fifth year of Mamma Mia! Tight-fitting tops, carefully pomaded hair, ostentatious gold neckwear ... and the women look pretty gaudy...
...Valli wasn't just kidding with his falsetto. It was not pure, not angelic, like the sweet-child voices of Brian and Carl Wilson on such Beach Boys tracks as "In My Room" and "God Only Knows." Valli's had a raspiness that gave his romantic pleas gravel, gravity, balls. This was no castrato, but a grown, yearning heterosexual male whose impossibly high voice set him apart, in tone and content, from the baritone norm, and made him perfect for all the outsider characters he would articulate in the Seasons' hits...
...musical to hear good music that will soon be familiar to the rest of the world, what do you go for? Good old familiar music. Hence Jersey Boys, which recounts the career of the '60s vocal quartet the Four Seasons and their tenor-falsetto lead singer Frankie Valli...
...Start with The Voice. The Four Seasons' sound begins with Valli, who functioned as both the lead tenor and the falsetto backup singer; he told the story and provided the color. What astonished immediately and lastingly was the power of his glass-shattering, dog-dementing falsetto (often multiplied on record by having him dupe his solos on a second track). First time around, hearing "Sherry," listeners may have thought it was a gag. Sometimes he used it for fun, in high-pitched baby talk, as George Rock's comic falsetto had for the vocal in Spike Jones' 1947 novelty...
...have a few other British artists for him to consider. Vivien Leigh ... Jean Simmons ... Joan Greenwood ... Margaret Lockwood ... Celia Johnson ... Claire Bloom ... Jessie Matthews ... Kay Kendall ... Dorothy Tutin ... Barbara Steele ... Julie Christie ... And who was that elusive beauty whose gravity anchors Carol Reed's "The Third Man"? Ah! Alida Valli...