The debut of the Melbourne version of Jersey Boys was met with considerable fanfare in June 2009. Its continued success and the almost full Wednesday matinee that I attended attests to the popularity of the show. The story revolves around the birth of the band and its various iterations before the final lineup comes together underneath the name of The Four Seasons. Following the history of the group, Jersey Boys attempts to use the familiar music to draw the audience into their story. As might be expected the music is easily the best bit of the show. The song selection was fantastic and a good range of music across the band’s career was featured.  Unfortunately the story side of the musical is nowhere near as interesting. Most of the problems with the story come in the first act. For a musical about the Four Seasons, they spend an large amount of stage time on the various groups that preceded them. There is no doubt that the varying band members and number of band names that they performed under are an important part of the Four Seasons. But so much time is spent on this part of the band’s history that when some of the tragedy and emotion comes in the second act, the audience didn’t seem to care.  This was evident from looking at the crowd reaction to the story and the music. The crowd was indifferent during the first half and hour and only came to life when they finally performed some of the big hits (The run of Sherry, Big Girls Don’t Cry and Walk Like a Man got a great reaction). Finally when one of the few tragic scenes occured right near the end of the second act, it failed to get much emotion from the audience. For a musical that was light-hearted and even a bit throwaway at times, this attempt at tragedy fell very flat.

The humour felt very clunky at most points in the show. Most gags fell flat on the slightly older crowd with the notable exception of some of the physical humour and the character of Nick Massi. This is a bit of a shame as a good musical can usually be relied upon to deliver some good jokes to lighten the mood. Finally the amount of swearing was a bit unexpected for a show of this nature. They understandably wanted to capture the culture of New Jersey during this period and rampant swearing was definitely part of this. However, I suspect they at least partially wanted to add it in to defeat any criticism that the material was a bit too sweet and light-hearted. Apart from a few jokes about sex and some double-entendres the rest of the material was pretty light. There were only a couple of more serious scenes in the whole piece and as mentioned previously those were pretty throwaway and had little emotion.

On the positive side, the music and performances by the cast were top notch. The distinctive falsetto of Frankie Valli was done very well and the backing band was right on the money. One minor annoyance was that the New Jersey accents were a little bit much though, especially from Scott Johnson. I understand that most people would expect people doing this show to put on American/New Jersey accents, but unless they are seamless it is rather distracting. It would have been better to run with a more generic American accent or don’t bother with it at all. The Melbourne version of Jersey Boys is a very solid performance of an alright musical. The pacing of the musical is a little out of whack and the writing is just not sharp or funny enough to be truly memorable. Fans of the band will enjoy the musical because of the great music, everyone else should try and get cheap tickets if they want to bother at all.