Just Too Good to be True

Over the weekend, I went to London to see a West End production of Jersey Boys, the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. The trip was planned as part of my friend’s 30th birthday celebration; she had picked the show and done all the work to get us there. I was excited to go, but mostly because I was looking forward to getting out of the house and spending a day with friends.  I am generally willing to see anything, try any food and go anywhere (I’m an easy date), but I wouldn’t have picked this particular show if I was doing the choosing.

In fact, I have to confess I was a little shaky on who the Four Seasons were and which songs were actually theirs. I’d heard of them, of course, but in my head, I had confused Frankie Valli with Eddie Fisher and I was vaguely expecting a musical with shows in Vegas and salacious gossip about Elisabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds. The music of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons belongs to that unfortunate class of pop music that is  so ubiquitous that it becomes invisible. The Four Seasons are one of the best selling music groups of all time, selling more than 175 million records worldwide. Their songs have been featured in countless commercials, television shows and movies — we’ve heard them so much that any urgency or impact   of “Oh, What a Night” or “Big Girls Don’t Cry” might have once had has been consigned to history.

Similarly, I said for years and years that I  didn’t like  the French Impressionist Claude Monet. Seeing prints of his water lilies in doctor’s offices, hotels, even McDonald’s, had made me completely lose sight of any beauty they might have carried for me at one time. And, then a few years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Paris with my mother and we went to the Musée D’Orsay where I found myself entranced by Monet’s paintings of the facade of Notre Dame — the colors, the energy, the texture — they were so interesting in real life (most paintings are better in real life, but some really benefit from actual contact). They were so much more like Van Gogh or Jackson Pollock than the pretty bland  pictures of pretty things they had become in my mind.

Context can be everything in art. Hearing the  Four Seasons’ songs again, in a fresh context, I  was actually  listening to them for the first time. And this is what I found — most of the songs were perfect pop gems with gorgeous harmonies performed with absolute commitment and Frankie Valli’s voice is  an otherworldly instrument.   I was astonished once again by the bounty of the world — that it can contain a voice like that and a few actors that can imitate it. The crowd was so enraptured that there were times when they were literally dancing in the aisles, the narrative of the show blurring with the familiar songs so much that the crowd almost seemed to believe that they were watching actually Valli. The musical itself was highly enjoyable, any fans of VH1’s erstwhile hit show Behind the Music will recognize the familiar trajectory of a rise from obscurity (slightly more colourful in this case, Goodfellas meets American Bandstand) to become a huge success followed by excess, betrayals and inevitable decline. Except Valli,   who  is still performing  at the age of 76, has never really given up the dream. At least, that is how Jersey Boys tells it — Valli is an artist who was always in it for the love of the music. It might well be a beautiful fiction, but it’s one I want to buy into.

My husband has been teasing me, walking around singing “Walk Like a Man” in a terrible (terrible!) falsetto and accusing me of suddenly liking “old man” music. But that’s not really it, I haven’t become a fan of the Four Seasons as much as I am a lifelong fan of looking at the other side of things or seeing the world anew. And, blessedly, life keeps giving me opportunities to do just that.

A medley from the show:

And my favorite Frankie Valli and the 4 Seasons song: