JERSEY BOYS reviews

Ok I'll predict LOL

I say mixed to positive.

Mixed from Brantley, **1/2 to *** stars from Barnes...

Well, glory be, Matthew Murray likes something:

"This just in: Pigs spotted flying over Manhattan.

After a year that's seen the jukebox musical crash and burn time and time again, a show has finally come along that makes you think that just maybe there's some value to the concept. Few reviewers have been harder on the genre than I, but when something as respectably crafted as Jersey Boys comes along, I have to admit that some success has been attained.

It's simply not possible to be angry at the frenetically kinetic and intermittently exciting show that just opened at the recently rechristened August Wilson. In fact, there's even decent, non-guilty enjoyment on hand here, for the first time since Mamma Mia! ushered in the style of show with no real use for a book except to string together pop tunes. If it's damning Jersey Boys with faint praise to lump it in that category, it's only fair to give it credit for the inventiveness it possesses that most other recent musicals can't even approximate."

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"It's an energizing experience, and a welcome one in the darker days of a year that's been illuminated by too few outstanding Broadway musicals. And, yes, it's all happening at a jukebox show. Ah well - if it's a shame that there are any at all on Broadway, the best we can hope for from now on is that as many possible will provide the same kind of fun and thrills that Jersey Boys so effortlessly exudes."



http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/JerseyBoys.html

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Updated On: 11/6/05 at 06:36 PM

It's good to know Matthew Murray isn't all sour.

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TheaterMania is up. I'll let Margo post it

I'd say mixed.

Theatremania is Mixed-to-Positive (he likes it, but seems more than a little dismissive of it):

"Yeah, sure. Go see Jersey Boys, subtitled "The Story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons." So what if the Des McAnuff production is so slick that you could slip on it and slide to an untimely end? Fuhgeddaboudit! It's got the Four Seasons songs, an astonishing string of melodic and melodramatic celebrations of adolescent emotion that make this show a highly appealing oldies concert. It pushes its broad-shouldered way into the theater as a better example of the currently ubiquitous "jukebox musical" form. Included for the delectation of baby-boomer fans and salivating others are commendable facsimiles of clicks that The Four Seasons released in the '60s and '70s, when supersonic-voiced Frankie Valli was at first just one of the boys and later was top-billed.
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Late in this glittery paean to the Garden State lads, the on-stage Valli talks about being asked what career highlights he remembers and says, "When everything dropped away and all there was was the music -- that was the best." So it goes in Jersey Boys, which is another of McAnuff's seamless packages and is at its best when everything else but the music drops away. The rock-and-roll juggernaut moves speedily but doesn't necessarily dig too deep. The heavy metal (not in the musical sense) set by Klara Zieglerova, Howell Binkley's chiaroscuro lighting, Steve Canyon Kennedy's essential sound design, the shark-skin suit-heavy Jess Goldstein wardrobe, and the Michael Clark projections are suavely professional stuff -- particularly, Clark's projections on three large screens suspended high above the stage. They often feature Roy Lichtenstein-like, full-color drawings and are the giveaway to the nature of this finely calibrated enterprise. Lichtenstein was an ironist in paint, who regularly appropriated plummy comic-strip frames to mock human emotion and high art. By nodding so blatantly to him, McAnuff and librettists Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice tip their approach to the Four Seasons story. (Brickman is a sometime Woody Allen collaborator and a filmmaker in his own right; Elice has years of Serino Coyne marketing expertise on his resume.) Jersey Boys is a cartoon take on the lives of four big boys who didn't do too much crying but did have a few things about which they could weep.
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Despite its flaws, you can't beat this show with a stick. The multitudes of other-side-of-the-Hudson folks who for years have been gloating about having Giants Stadium and New York football teams on Meadowlands territory now have something else to gloat about: They've got Jersey Boys on Broadway, where it could remain for quite some time.


http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/7052

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Ah, Murray likes it. That's useful to know.

Reviews always come out sort of randomly for Sunday night openings.

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Margo...Jersey Boys or Color Purple??? If you had to pick one.

Will you be seeing Jersey Boys? And when do we get to read the highly anticipated Margo review of Purple?

I'm gonna try to see JERSEY BOYS in the next couple of weeks if I can. I'm posting my COLOR PURPLE review tomorrow.

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The AP is Mixed-to-Positive:

"Jersey Boys" wears its jukebox-musical credentials without apology. And well it should.

When it sings and moves, this musical biography of pop icons Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, which opened Sunday at Broadway's August Wilson Theatre, really rocks. The energy is unstoppable, particularly from the four lead performers -- Christian Hoff, Daniel Reichard, J. Robert Spencer and the amazing John Lloyd Young as Valli.
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Only when it attempts to tell the story of the lads' rise to fame and fortune does "Jersey Boys" occasionally falter, sinking into a soapy resume of their lives. Authors Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice refract the tale through different guys in the group, a device that grows increasingly long-winded.
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The physical production is impressive. Pop-art projections by Michael Clark fill the back wall, taking their cue from the four seasons to chronicle the Four Seasons' career: a hopeful spring beginning, a successful summer, a turbulent fall and finally a winter of reconciliation as the four men are honored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Jukebox musicals have been having a rough time on Broadway despite the mega-success of "Mamma Mia!" The demise of "Good Vibrations," "Lennon" and "All Shook Up" seemed to sound a death knell for this type of boomer nostalgia. "Jersey Boys" shows there still is theatrical life in mining pop hits from the past."

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/news/wire/sns-ap-theater-jersey-boys,0,4092531.story?coll=sns-ap-entertainment-headlines

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