Theatre

In 2005, the so-called ‘jukebox’ musical was clearly on the blink. What had briefly seemed like a fail-safe formula – recycling beloved rock-pop songs into Broadway spectaculars, à la ‘Mamma Mia!’ and ‘Movin’ Out’ – was suddenly failing everywhere. A Beach Boys musical, ‘Good Vibrations’, washed up like a dead whale at a luau. An Elvis Presley show, ‘All Shook Up’, collapsed in six months; ‘Lennon’, an anthology of John Lennon hits, lasted six weeks. When the Queen tuner ‘We Will Rock You’ (which had bypassed New York for Las Vegas) announced that it was closing, some people may have heard the clang of coffin nails for a genre that few Broadway devotees had ever taken to heart.
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But on November 6, 2005, ‘Jersey Boys’ – based around the 1960s doo-wop ditties of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons – opened on Broadway, and it was clear that a smash hit had been born. ‘Jersey Boys’ was not only enormously popular with audiences, it also won over many of the same critics who had dismissed the jukebox musical as a broken machine. So as the show opens in London, it is worth asking: where did ‘Jersey Boys’ go right?

Many of the show’s assets are easy to discern, and primary among them is the music at its core: a hit parade of Four Seasons classics (including ‘Sherry’, ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ and ‘Walk Like a Man’). These songs, by Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe, have the irresistible sonic motion of an old-fashioned locomotive, from the chug-chug of the baselines to the thrilling steam whistle of Valli’s falsetto vocals.

Still, catchy retro songs alone do not guarantee the success of a jukebox musical (ask the Beach Boys). What really sets ‘Jersey Boys’ apart from the pack is its canny script by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice: a documentary-style biography of the Four Seasons’ rise from the mean streets of New Jersey – messy with organised crime – to the hearts of millions of teenage girls. ‘Jersey Boys’ is basically a conventional rise-and-fall story; its dramatic heights are hardly vertiginous, and its Valli is none too deep. But it swims on the strength of a powerful stroke of good sense: the recognition that a Four Seasons musical would need to be about the Four Seasons themselves, with the songs presented as though the Four Seasons were singing them in concert.

To understand why this matters, one must take into account the fact that the jukebox musical is actually an offshoot of an earlier kind of show: the catalogue musical, which flourished from the late 1970s through to the early 1990s. Catalogue shows were based on the works of individual songwriters from before World War II – George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller – and used songs that in many cases had been written for the stage. But as older audiences were gradually replaced by baby boomers, these classic pop songs no longer meant as much; tunes from the 1960s and 1970s were now the repository of nostalgic sentiment.

This has posed a significant problem for the Broadway musical – not just because the beat-driven songs themselves (written for the radio, not the theatre) are inherently less dramatic in their construction, but also because they are often associated with very particular artists and cults of personality. Few people have a strong idea of how Gershwin sounded when singing his own music, but the ghosts of Presley or Lennon are harder to exorcise when their signature tunes are being forged into a new story. For modern audiences this tends to give jukebox shows a particularly risible dimension. ‘Mamma Mia!’, the mother of all jukebox musicals and the exception that proves the rule, succeeds precisely because it doesn’t take itself seriously as theatre: it’s like karaoke by proxy.

The biographical strategy of ‘Jersey Boys’ makes this question moot. Director Des McAnuff has called the show ‘a musical for people who don’t like musicals’, and that self-evasive paradox is the secret of its unique prosperity. Songs in ‘Jersey Boys’ do not do what they are supposed to do in musical theatre. They mean nothing as expressions of the inner lives of the characters singing them. At once the apotheosis and dead end of its microgenre, ‘Jersey Boys’ suggests that the jukebox musical is most successful when it more or less renounces the duties of being a musical at all.

'Jersey Boys’ is previewing at the Prince Edward.