Of miracles and men

According to Jersey Boys’ co-creator Rick Elice, the show exists because of three miracles that took place between October 2003 and October 2004. The first miracle was that Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio gave Elice and his writing partner Marshall Brickman permission to create a musical based on their lives, using the Four Seasons’ music. The second miracle was that Broadway veteran and then-Artistic Director of the La Jolla Playhouse Des McAnuff committed to the project before one line of dialogue had been written. And the third miracle was that Valli and Gaudio first saw the musical in a theater, surrounded by an enthusiastic audience instead of in a barren rehearsal hall, where they might have been tempted to pull the plug on the whole project.

“The gods of theater were smiling on all of us when we were making this show,” Elice says.

Another thing other people might find miraculous is that Jersey Boys is the first musical Elice and Brickman have written. At the time, Elice, a former ad man, was consulting for Walt Disney Studios, offering advice on projects such as the stage adaptation of Disney’s High School Musical. Brickman had honed his comedy chops writing for television in the 1960s and on Woody Allen movies, like Annie Hall and Manhattan, in the 1970s. Brickman and Elice knew each other socially, but they were just starting to talk about becoming writing partners when the idea for Jersey Boys fell in Elice’s lap.

“I got a call about doing a show with or about the Four Seasons about a year after Mamma Mia! opened on Broadway,” Elice says. “I did want to do something with Marshall, and we never thought it would be a show, but we arranged a luncheon with Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio — the two operative Seasons.”

If nothing else, Elice figured, he’d be able to spend an afternoon with two musicians he admired as a kid. “In New York, lower middle class parents ship their kids off to [summer camp] so they can spend some time by themselves and the kids can get away from the intense heat of the city,” Elice explains. “You had counselors who were all older than you, and they’re the people that you want to be like, so the music they listen to becomes very important to you. They were listening to the Beatles, the Kinks, the Dead, the Who, the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys. These became my aspirational songs when I was a boy.”

Elice and Brickman met Gaudio and Valli in the back of a dark restaurant. For hours, Gaudio and Valli told them stories about how the band began, what happened behind the scenes, what happened when success came and how they dealt with it. He and Brickman asked why they had never heard those stories before.

“They told us that they were never really written about because they were these blue collar, local guys without any glamour quotient — they didn’t have long hair, they didn’t have exotic accents, they didn’t come from across the pond [and] they came from the wrong side of the river,” Elice says. “Their story was never told because they were deemed unimportant by the cultural elite. We suggested this untold story should be the show. They were intrigued enough to ask for a treatment and ultimately courageous enough to say, ‘Go ahead and put it up there onstage, warts and all.’”

Brickman and Elice had only one person they wanted to direct the show — Des McAnuff. “I had worked [with him] years before when I was a kid and he was some insanely talented genius from Canada,” Elice says. “I knew that he was sort of a rocker and [had] directed The Who’s Tommy on Broadway. … It turned out that the very first LP Des had as a boy was ‘Sherry & 11 Other Hits’ by the Four Seasons.”

The other thing McAnuff had was his own theater — the La Jolla Playhouse at the University of California, San Diego. “He said: ‘I’ll do the life story of the Four Seasons on stage next summer. (This was maybe October.) We have to have a script by May, so you better get to work,’” Elice remembers. “It was a relatively quick process from page to stage, as far as Broadway musicals go. We started writing [Jersey Boys] at the very beginning of 2004, and by August we were in rehearsal. We opened in October at La Jolla Playhouse, and that was how the little rocketship got started.”

On opening night, the 500-seat house was packed. The audience rose to its feet once in the first act, twice during the second act and screamed for more at the show’s end. Brickman and Elice thought the reaction was a fluke.

“We thought, ‘This will never happen again. This is like some crazy, rabid Four Seasons fans have flown in from all over the world,’” Elice says. Southern California was Beach Boys territory; they had been told that the Four Seasons never sold records there. But the second night’s audience behaved like the first night’s. When the third night’s audience also went berserk, Elice and Brickman realized they weren’t just getting a false read from a few fans; they had something very special on their hands.

The show ran more than a week before Gaudio and Valli finally saw it. “They wanted to hold it at arms’ length in case it was really bad; they wanted to have plausible deniability,” Elice says. “By the time they came, the cast was very excited about the guys they were portraying being in the theater. The audience was electrified because Des introduced them from the stage. All Marshall and I did was stand in the back and watch Bob and Frankie watch themselves, because they had the right at the end of that performance to say, ‘We don’t like this and we’re going to stop it.’” Instead, Elice says, they became the show’s biggest supporters.

Despite the amount of time Elice spent working on Jersey Boys pre- and post-Broadway, he says he still gets goosebumps watching the show. Seeing the first appearance of three guys at three microphone stands and the ramp-up to the end of the first act still thrills him. But it is a scene in the second act that always puts a lump in his throat.

“When [Bob] Gaudio sort of forces through, against daunting odds, a record Frankie’s recorded that he feels will really help [propel] Frankie on to the next stage of his career … and it turns into a huge success, that part of the rags to riches story is somewhat familiar to us,” Elice says. “But this [act] — something that a friend does for another friend for no reason other than to help his friend — I find to really be at the root of what this show is about.

“While Jersey Boys tells the story of the Four Seasons, it’s hard not to be touched by the eternal issues that the Seasons are touched by because they’re our issues, too: wanting to belong, wanting to achieve, wanting to be respected [and] wanting to find home,” Elice continues. “The bonds of society among men and women are very strong. And when people stand up for other people, I find that to be a very emotional thing.”

Jersey Boys plays The Fabulous Fox Theatre May 27-June 21.