Jersey Boys

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John
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Jersey Boys

Post by John »

We were at the Saturday evening performance in London, and excellent seats they were too. Right at the centre front of the Dress Circle, always a good spot. The prince Edward theatre is a classic building, trimmed with enough fake opulence to get by and remind us that it once enjoyed better times.

The show was fine, very well staged and delivered with a high level of competence. I enjoyed it.

The disturbing thing is that I know too much about The Four Seasons story, and this fairly lightweight script is so convoluted and inaccurate in its timeline that it bears little relation to the way events unfurled in reality. There is a core element of truth in the story, but the rest is pretty much mixed up to suit a plot. Does this matter? Probably not, but a whole generation of people will now exist who have a quite distorted view of the background of The Four Seasons. Ah well....

The music is the raison d'etre for the event, and the music is always good to hear. No-one can do Frankie Valli properly and in this show I suspect that much of it was pre-recorded with a very small amount of live singing from the cast. The falsetto parts were dodged in the main, with the one exception of the rendering of "I'm in the mood for Love" which was excellent, but taken from the original cast recording I think.

Musically the antics of the "Four Seasons" were absurd - they never danced and leapt about like that - but then more poetic licence I suppose.

Still worth seeing and I really enjoyed the overall weekend away.

The show: 3s
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