The Jersey Boys are coming to Philly.
And no: We’re not talking about The Situation and company doing a drunken pub/tanning-salon crawl.
“Jersey Boys,” the documentary-style musical chronicling the rise and struggles of 1960s pop-rock sensations Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, has been a hit with audiences internationally since it debuted in 2005 on Broadway. And its popularity shows no signs of slowing down.
“I just recently heard the show is booked through 2015,” actor Jonathan Hadley said. “This thing is just going and going.”
The 46-year-old out actor plays Bob Crewe, a songwriter who co-wrote several of The Four Seasons’ biggest hits: “Sherry,” “Walk Like a Man” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” He also wrote huge hits for other artists during his career, including “Lady Marmalade” and “Devil With A Blue Dress On.”
“Bob Crewe is the genius behind the scenes,” Hadley said. “He’s their producer, manager and lyricist. So we see that in the show they start to take off once the four of them meet with him. I often describe Bob Crewe as the “Fifth Season,” really. He created what is their signature Four Seasons sound in the studio. While they were out singing it, he was creating it in the studio.”
Crewe also happens to be gay, but his sexuality isn’t exactly a big part of the story audiences see on stage.
“It’s completely in the context of 1964,” Hadley explained. “Then, nobody was out. Everybody was in the closet. The line that sums it up the best is by one of the characters, Bob Gaudio — who wrote most of the music and collaborated with Bob Crewe as the lyricist — [when he] said, ‘We knew something was different about this guy but, back then, we thought Liberace was just theatrical.’ So I think that sums up how you see Bob Crewe. He’s definitely flamboyant. I think today an audience would label him as gay, but back then he was theatrical. That’s about as specific as it gets in the show.”
Both Valli and Crewe are still alive and kicking, both still doing what brought them fame and fortune: performing and writing hits, respectively.
Hadley said Crewe wasn’t involved in the creation of “Jersey Boys” per se, but he has been known to give his two cents to the production here and there.
“He was not directly involved. I know he came in and saw rehearsals and workshops toward the end right before it opened before it came to Broadway. I know he made some suggestions here and there but he wasn’t as involved as Frankie and the remaining Four Seasons. I have yet to meet him, but I e-mail him on his birthday every year. We have that kind of contact.”
The focus of the show is the music of the Four Seasons, who had an impressive run of hits from the early 1960s through the ’70s. And it doesn’t matter how young you are or if the group’s name doesn’t ring a bell: Somehow, some way, if you’ve ever been in an elevator or seen a TV commercial, you know a Four Seasons song.
This is probably why the show is such a hit.
“It attracts a huge crowd of all age ranges,” Hadley said. “I’d say the 55 and over crowd, it hits them in a different way because it’s nostalgia. It’s the music they grew up with and it reminds them of high school, their proms and their first dates. With the younger crowd that comes, they’re responding to the songs that they’ve heard on the radio and commercials and to the story. They are also introduced to songs they didn’t know. They run out and buy the soundtrack and get into it that way. We get a huge range of people in the audience and they all leap to their feet by the end of it. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Hadley said he falls somewhere in the middle as far as his exposure to the music of the Four Seasons.
“I didn’t have their records but I certainly knew their music. When I was a kid in the 1970s, they were still on the radio with their later stuff. But once I got into the show, I didn’t realize how many of their songs I knew. I think that’s something all of the audiences realize when they get here. You know almost every song in the show. You realize you’re a bigger fan than you thought you were. It keeps it in the theatrical realm, but they want you to feel like you’re at a concert. They pump up the volume and it shakes the theater and, by the end, you feel like you’re at a Frankie concert.”
And while the music is big, Hadley said, the story behind it is just as powerful.
“It’s one of the strongest scripts I have ever read for a musical, especially in this genre of the jukebox musical. The roles that I was auditioning for, the scripts, were great. So that was exciting. After auditioning for it, I went and saw it and was completely bowled over. I had no idea the emotional impact this show was going to have. The music is universal. Everybody knows the songs.
“But it goes back to the story, which is about friendship, family, lifelong ties and perseverance. You get the whole story of these guys and it’s not pretty. You go through the hard stuff as well as the glamour of it. I think that’s what attracts people. By the end, they were all coming out saying, ‘I had no idea all this happened to these musicians.’”
Hadley added he’s glad he landed the role of Crewe.
“For me, it’s the perfect fit. He’s a great character. They’ve given me some great lines and some great scenes. And I don’t have to sing the high notes like those kids that play the Four Seasons do, like Frankie Valli, so I’m thrilled about that.”
Speaking of Valli, Hadley said finding actors who can pull off the singer’s piercing falsetto night after night isn’t an easy task for the show’s producers.
“They do a nationwide search every so often. Right now they’ve got a stable of guys that do it, but it’s taken years to find that because you have specific looks requirements. You have to be a short, dark guy who can hit the high notes who looks somewhat Italian. They used to have a thing called “Frankie Camp,” where they would identify a bunch of guys and bring them all to New York for a weekend [and] they would teach them to be Frankie Valli. But we’ve got two guys that do it on our tour. One guy does six shows a week and the other does two. And then there are two understudies. So every company has about four guys that play Frankie.”
The Kimmel Center presents “Jersey Boys” through Dec. 12 at The Forrest Theatre, 1114 Walnut St. For more information, call (215) 790-5847.
Larry Nichols can be reached at [email protected].