All these years on, ‘Jersey Boys’ has still got it

At the Walnut Street Theatre, Jersey Boys opens with “Ces soirées-là,” the French version of “Oh, What a Night.” Tommy DeVito, of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, tells us it was a huge hit when the band toured Paris in 2000.

“I don’t want to seem ubiquitous, but we’re the guys who put Jersey on the map,” he adds.

For the uninitiated, Jersey Boys is about a global-sensation 1960s rock band known as Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, with Valli, DeVito, Bob Gaudio, and Nick Massi. It premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2004 and opened on Broadway the following year, where it ran for 4,642 performances, until 2017. The show has wowed folks in the UK and Japan, and nearly everywhere in between.

And as a Jersey girl, you can take it from me, all these years on, Jersey Boys has still got it.

The high-energy romp through this nostalgic jukebox musical is the story of Frankie Valli (not “Vally”— Italian names have to end with a vowel, a girlfriend tells him) and the Four Seasons as they rise to fame and, like so many other stories, crash and burn.

The backup singers, playing multiple roles, add to the volume but not much to the story since their characters aren’t really defined, but the orchestra gives the show the big Broadway sound it needs. John Farrell’s set design, along with Matt Demascolo’s lighting, is sometimes eye-popping, sometimes dips into the funny/cheesy as when the huge fake Cadillac convertibles roll on and off the stage.

The creation of the group and its members’ friendships and their talent fills in the spaces between the show’s many, many songs — 34 numbers — all written by Bob Gaudio. The show provides one-after-another moments that make you go, “Wait! What? He wrote that one too?” (Consider: “Bye bye Baby,” “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” “Earth Angel,” “Sherry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Working My Way Back to You” and the inevitable big finale, “Oh, What a Night.”)

The New Jersey charisma is at work from the start: Tommy (Ken Sandberg) has all the body English of the neighborhood — the charm and the aggression of the guy who organizes the group and makes music on the corner under the streetlight. They understand that unlike the Beatles, their fans are the working class.

Central to the group is the headliner, Frankie Valli (Will Stephan Connell, who nails the famous falsetto every time), and the songwriter Bob Gaudio (the excellent Eddie Olmo II).

Various women come and go — wives, daughters, mistresses — the whole sordid sad destruction of family as the guys tour on the road year after year. And so Act Two turns ugly with resentment and anger.

But the book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice manages to rescue the story from its darkness and give us a big reunion number when the band is inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The audience rises to its feet, applauding, happy to remember the good times back in the day.

Jersey Boys

Through Nov. 3 at Walnut Street Theatre, 825 Walnut St, Phila.; walnutstreettheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.

Theater reviews are produced independently by The Inquirer without editorial input by their sponsor, Visit Philadelphia.