Theater

Well, this week was shaping up to be a pretty ordinary week until Wednedsay, when some friends called and offered the wife and me some tickets to Jersey Boys, the musical about the Four Seasons. Chicago has a very high per-capita concentration of theater, and we've been to lots of shows, but I had never been to one of the big "Broadway in Chicago" shows downtown, so I was intrigued. I would not have spent the big bucks to see one just out of curiosity, but our friend's boss' wife's untimely illness presented the opportunity. (Not to devalue the big productions---it's just that there are so many little storefront theater groups doing great work for relatively low ticket prices, that you can see a lot of good theater in Chicago without having to deal with the prices and parking hassles of theater down in the tourist zone.)

The show itself was fun. The story of the band was (it turned out, when I later looked them up on Wikipedia) streamlined and idealized almost to the point of fiction, but it was engaging, and the music was good. Everybody knows the Four Seasons big hits, if you hear them, but I hadn't really had a sense of just how many great pop songs they had cranked out over the years. After "Sherry Baby" and "Walk Like a Man", I was thinking, Okay, now what? But over the rest of the show, as they went through the rest of the Four Seasons hits (and Frankie Valli solo stuff---the line between the two is blurry) I kept thinking, Oh yeah! I remember that one!

The Four Seasons rose to prominence and for a while ruled the charts in the post-Elvis / pre-Beatles interlude, and a huge part of the audience was people who had been young then reliving their youth---at intermission I heard several conversations around us of people reminiscing about the good old days. I suppose that is the point of the show, and I wonder whether the same sort of thing took place with people a few years younger at productions of Movin' Out or Mamma Mia! (If I was smart I'd start now putting together a feel-good nostalgia play based around the songs of one of the great 80s pop bands, for my generation. The Cars, maybe?) But even without the nostalgia factor working in my case, it was still an enjoyable show, and one of our friends left determined to get a Four Seasons greatest hits album, which was probably the other point of the show.