A comfy jukebox

Jersey Boys
Review | by Sean McQuaid
Charlottetown Festival, Sobey Family Theatre
June 28, 2024

Last year, the Charlottetown Festival was thinking outside the box: benching Anne of Green Gables–The Musical, hosting a new musical, even running a non-musical mainstage show. This year’s lineup sees the festival thinking inside the box—“Jukebox, that is,” says your cartoony critic in his best Foghorn Leghorn voice. 

Anne is back, the all-musical line-up is back, and the non-Anne mainstage show is the festival’s favourite type of non-Anne show: a jukebox musical, a show built around preexisting popular songs. In this case it’s Tony-winning international hit Jersey Boys (first staged in 2004), showcasing the classic pop tunes of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. 

So, yes, it’s a summer of theatrical comfort food on the mainstage this year, but that’s okay—the Charlottetown Festival excels at this stuff, and Jersey Boys is an especially tasty variation on the old reliable jukebox musical recipe.

With a book written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice and featuring vintage songs by Four Seasons founding member Bob Gaudio and the band’s early producer Bob Crewe, Jersey Boys boasts an irresistibly hummable soundtrack and a lively semi-true story, how the original Four Seasons rose to fame but broke up at the height of their success. 

Various people and events are omitted, inserted, reshuffled, remixed or otherwise modified, and the group’s founders—doubling here as dueling narrators—give Rashomon-like conflicting accounts of it all; but the broad strokes echo the group’s real-life story, an engaging yarn full of humour, heartbreak and big, colourful characters. 

Biggest and best of those characters are the boys from New Jersey, the original Four Seasons: smalltime hustler Tommy DeVito (played here with goofy swagger by Tyler Check) and oddball musical savant Nick Massi (an inscrutably intense Jacob Hemphill), a pair of struggling musicians who moonlight as petty crooks (or vice versa); their naïve younger friend and protégé Frankie (played with passionate, Valli-esque falsetto flair by Aaron MacKenzie), a gifted singer; and their later recruit Bob Gaudio (a likeably earnest Trevor Patt), a smart and business-savvy songwriter. 

The Frankie-Tommy bond is the story’s strongest thread, a tragic show biz variation on Treasure Island’s old Long John Silver/Jim Hawkins dynamic, the young man estranged from an older, shadier mentor. In a musical full of love stories, the most compelling ones are this doomed brotherly love and the entire quartet’s shared love of music. Frankie’s closing speech about the pure joy of the group’s early work, played beautifully by MacKenzie, is the show’s most moving moment. 

Supporting cast standouts include an exuberant Eric Dahlinger as the band’s excitable young hanger-on and future movie star Joe Pesci; the sultry-turned-sour Kaleigh Gorka as Frankie’s first wife Mary Delgado; a charming Melissa MacKenzie as Frankie’s girlfriend Lorraine; the off-kilter appeal of Andrew McAllister as an eccentric Bob Crewe; and the artfully understated comic timing of Laurie Murdoch as Jersey mob boss Gyp de Carlo and other characters. 

Highlights of director Adam Brazier’s solid production include set/costume designer William Layton, whose period outfits and ever-shifting array of frames, backdrops, signs and compactly evocative mini-sets keep the story handsomely situated; the lively lighting design of Renee Brode (I’m a sucker for a well-deployed disco ball); and the musical direction of Bob Foster, who leads his crackerjack pit band and the show’s fine onstage singers in rollicking re-creations of hits like “Oh What a Night” and “Who Loves You.” 

Those happily familiar, endearingly catchy tunes give Jersey Boys a big head start in winning over its audience, but a strong script well-executed by Brazier’s company makes this jukebox musical as compelling as it is comfortable.