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'Jersey Boys,' Far From Home

by Zoe Strimpel
Wed, 19 Mar 2008 at 7:20 PM

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"Jersey Boys," now in its third year on Broadway, has made the leap to London. It's always touch and go when it comes to how the British — and particularly British theater critics (the most British of them all) — will react to an onslaught of sheer Americana. This show, no doubt chosen to transfer only after the most careful commercial and cultural analysis, has done relatively well.

The Times, somewhat loftily, said that it "has the character, the narrative interest and the sense of place ... to rise way above its genre." The critic drew parallels between the Four Seasons (the band and heroes of the show, among them Frankie Valli and Tommy DeVito) and the Beatles. Both were crucially shaped by their cities.

"Jersey Boys is a blue-collar, meat-and-potatoes, straight-up-no-chaser kind of show," wrote Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph, "and I mean that as a compliment." His payoff line perfectly underscores just how British the new audience is. "Overpaid, oversexed and over here, it will, I suspect, be some time before London says Bye Bye Baby (Baby Goodbye) to the phenomenal Jersey Boys." Lovely.

Finally, the Evening Standard called the show a "refreshing change" from "those sagging lines of hagio-graphic tribute musicals to old rock 'n' rollers and bland bands." However, it concluded, "Jersey Boys" might be just a little too American yet for Britain. "I do doubt whether Jersey Boys will make it over here," wrote Nicholas de Jongh. "The life-stories and the songs strike me as being curiously timeless, remote and unreverberative for British audiences. This may be an American import too many." Ouch.

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