Valli too big to cry over 'Jersey Boys'

Frankie Valli has bronchitis. The voice - that voice - is uncharacteristically raspy, and he's coughing. Not only that, but a week ago he stood up inside his tour bus to turn up the TV at the moment the driver hit the brakes, and was thrown into the door.

He had to cancel several New York engagements and return to Los Angeles. "I'm sure I bruised several bones, a lot of internal bruising," he says on the phone. "I mean, that's life on the road."

Unlike all those Frankies who take the stage every night from Broadway to Sydney to sing "Sherry" and "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" in the iconic falsetto of the iconic North Jersey Boy, there's no understudying the real Frankie Valli. If he's sick, the show does not go on.

But the other show - Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, now at Philadelphia's Forrest Theatre - goes on and on. Regardless of what is going on in real Frankie's life, like Energizer Bunnies the theater Frankies sprout on stages all over the globe, every Frankie slightly different, trained in Frankie falsetto camp but every one getting gasps of recognition and remembrance from audiences - more than 2,000 performances in New York since November 2005, just-opened in Sydney with an Irish Frankie, and Thursday through Dec. 12 in Philadelphia with Joseph Leo Bwarie, who also played the role in Vegas (and was Frankie Valet in the 2009 movie Race to Witch Mountain).

Meanwhile, 76-year-old real Frankie is a bit impatient with the phone interview that has, alas, replaced a planned breakfast meeting at a Manhattan diner. Yes, he's a partner in the Broadway show (based on his 50/50 handshake deal with songwriter and Four Seasons colleague Bob Gaudio back in 1961), which, yes, has brought renewed enthusiasm for songs he and the boys, yes, believe were never taken seriously in their time.

The same old questions irritate him in a way that, frankly, the same old songs never do. Those songs thrill people nightly with nostalgic shudders of recognition, whether sung by the faux Frankies or the real Frankie, who is touring solo to sold-out audiences and enthusiastic reviews.

"It's very successful, honey," he says of Jersey Boys. "Beyond that, how would you feel if someone was doing your story? It feels good to know you've made an impact in a business that was very important, and you loved what you did. I've given these answers over and over."

Ah, Frankie Valli, still a charmer, a self-described "kid from the ghetto" just outside Newark. Grew up in the projects, a lot of music, a little mobbed up, a little rough, one of four corner-boy crooners who, against the odds, recorded scores of hits beginning in 1962 but never got the respect they craved from the industry. Then they broke up. It makes a good story.

Gaudio, 67, a producer of Jersey Boys and writer of the Four Seasons songs that ensured that Valli's falsetto would become legendary, puts the group's situation this way: "In 1964, 'Dawn (Go Away)' was No. 2, and the Beatles were No. 1, 3, 4 and 5. We were the bologna in the bread. We couldn't go up the chart or down the chart. We survived."

Of Frankie, he says: "Was he Paul McCartney, with the cute little haircut, getting women screaming out in the audience? No. We just didn't have it. I don't have the reasons why. Possibly we were older. I think we were on the wrong side of the river. Jersey's pretty popular now - I can't turn on the television without seeing Jersey. Back then, Jersey was some place in the backwoods. Little by little the recognition started to come."

It was Gaudio's idea to do a Four Seasons musical, after hearing one of his songs, "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" in the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter.

"I went through a metamorphosis," he says. "Hearing my song and Frankie's voice in this, it was a revelation that maybe we're a little more than radio music." And that maybe those songs - his songs - cut a little deeper than people remember, the memories a little more visceral than four decades of nostalgia prepares you for.

Indeed, at a performance of Jersey Boys, one hears throughout the theater a continuing, collective gasp of rediscovery. Even for those inclined to dismiss the Four Seasons as having gone one way - or stood still - while rock was going another, the music resonates.

Jersey Boys writer Marshall Brickman, 69, of Annie Hall fame, was one of those people. He says his Manhattan elitism and folkie bent did not prepare him for his own "Aha!" moment when he was reencountering all those songs. But it was the story that hooked him.

Gaudio and Valli "wanted to do a Mamma Mia kind of thing to retrofit a fictional thing," he says. "But after a couple glasses of wine, they opened up a little bit, what was it like growing up in New Jersey, being a little mobbed up, that whole aspect. I thought, 'If they let us do that, that's kind of great.' "

Beyond the not-always-happy narrative of the lives of the original Four Seasons - Valli, Gaudio, Tommy DeVito, and Nick Massi, with a little help from a very young Joey Pesci - the show derives its dramatic arc from the songs, each one a small chapter in the miracle of how they came to be. As if at a thriller, the audience waits to hear which comes next - and then, there it is: "Walk Like a Man" or the one the record company kept in the can for years, "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." People tear up.

As the Gaudio character says early in the show: "And then one day a tune pops into my head. I jot down some dummy words, Nick and I do a quick-cut arrangement, then we call the studio. . . . And the whole world exploded." That was "Sherry."

"It's electrifying," says Gaudio. "Even in Sydney, you feel there's a little prod going through their seats. They are electrified. You hear a gasp when a song starts, or the realization that Joe Pesci introduced me to Frankie Valli. All of these things are stunning to people."

He adds: "Frankie doesn't like to hear this one, but a friend of mine from La Jolla saw it in previews. He called me at intermission and said, 'You know what? This is going to be bigger than you ever were.' I said, 'That's OK.' But you have mixed emotions."

Valli, married three times but now single, father of four, including 16-year-old twins, who also lost two daughters (the death of one is dramatized in the show), doesn't want to hear about mixed emotions, or the preposterous idea that Jersey Boys the show might be bigger than Valli the singer.

He's still selling out shows, touring as much as he can, gravitating when possible to a full orchestra - 90 musicians suits him fine.

"How could I be jealous of my own success?" he asks. "Think that down for a moment. If somebody portrayed your life, would you be jealous of it? I can work as many days as I want. I was successful for over 45 years, 200 million records. Jersey Boys is an extension.

"We were never an industry act. We played shows for people. A lot of people become aware of the fact that we've had a lot of hits. We had over 60. A lot of people didn't realize that all those hits were ours."

And don't ask real Frankie to chew over what it is about the show - the music, the voice, the story - that so hits people in the gut.

"For me to sit and analyze what they're doing, why it's successful . . ." His voice trails off, then revs: "It's a true story of four guys who grew up with not very much going on in their lives and not much education and their climb to success, and their decline and their breakup. That's what the story is. It's a human-interest story."

And he just happens to be that human. "It's not going to be exactly me, because it's not me."

For that, you'll have to go to Jersey. Assuming he's well enough, Valli is scheduled to perform Nov. 19 to 21 at the Borgata in Atlantic City.

See 'JERSEY BOYS' on E3