The audience in both places was on its collective feet clapping, swaying, singing, mouthing the words and loving every second of this production. Balding heads bobbed to the music, women who imagined themselves once again thirteen swayed their older and somewhat bulkier bodies to the fantastic sounds emitting from the stage. With each new song that was played there was the recognition, the nudging of your partner to recollect and the sweet anticipation of the next song to come.
Nostalgia. It’s all about nostalgia. I said in a former article that the lives of Baby Boomers has become the fodder for nostalgia and by gosh it’s true. On stage we watch as four kids from Jersey evolve from street corner punks to lounge singers to the fringes of small time crime until finally they are The Four Seasons. They sing their way into our hearts and our collective memories until finally, at last, here it is, we all clap our hands to the strains of their first hit, from 1962, Sherry. “Sherry, Sherry baby, Sherrrrrry, Sherrrrry Baby, Sherry can you come out tonight, Come come come out tonight”. We all know the words, we mouth them, we look at the stranger sitting in the next seat and we give those knowing smiles. We all remember the words, “Why don’t you come out. To my twist party. Come out, Where the bright moon shines” we grin, we move in our seats and we are taken by the music back to 1962 with our shift dresses, madras shirts, nondescript hair styles, our fears and joys about being teenagers. All our teen-aged angst washes away as we look around at the audience; an audience of rounding, balding, shrinking people, just like us and we exult in our togetherness and our complete sense of joy and fun at what we are experiencing
We are reminiscing.
When I was younger I remember my mother reminiscing. She reminisced about the war years. She was British, born in London, and during the war she was training as a nurse. She lived through blackouts during which she walked many, many miles from her hospital in Dartford to her home in Greenwich (a huge distance!!) in order to spend her days off with her family. She went to pubs with her sisters and her brother and waited and anticipated the air raid sirens. She had American and Australian boyfriends until she met a Canadian in the Royal Navy who ultimately won her heart and brought her to Canada to live. But I digress.
She talked a lot about the war, especially during her later years. Like others of her era she thought they had the best music. What was the noise I was listening to? What was that dress I was wearing? In her day they had style. She did recognize that Elvis would be a star before I did when we watched him together on the Ed Sullivan Show way back when. She had a sense that he was something different and special. The other music she had a difficult time grasping.
And here I am, reminiscing. Watching both productions of Jersey Boys brought it all back. Oh my, yes, I remember hearing Sherry for the first time. “Sherry, can you come out tonight?” What a voice! Is that his real voice? He’s not as cute as Bobby Rydell. But I love the song. Walking along the street with my girlfriend, a pack of smokes carefully concealed in my dress pocket, singing at the top of our lungs, “You better ask your Mama, Sherry Baby, Tell her everything is alright. Come come come out tonight.” I didn’t care that I was incapable of carrying a tune, the song was riveting and I sang it as if I was Frankie Valli. In the same year they released Big Girls Don’t Cry and we heard the same high pitched falsetto, the incredible harmony, and saw them on television in their tailored, tight fitting suits doing their perfectly synchronized dance steps. The words resonated something to our silly teen-aged minds. Eat your hearts out Miley Cyrus and Brittany Spears ‘cause those boys could sing. They didn’t need gimmicks, million dollar productions behind them and slinky tight fitting outfits. They just stood there before us, wearing those peg-legged suits, that Brylcreemed hair shining like patent leather shoes, and boom, with a snap of Frankie’s fingers they were off. Harmonizing perfectly, swaying gently to the music in perfect time with each other, never for a second trying to conceal their tough accents. They were the real deal up there flaws and all and we loved it and ate it up. We wanted gangster type boyfriends who could sing and look cool in a suit.
Is it any wonder we go in droves to see their incarnations on the stage night after night to watch with fascination their semi-criminal lives, their ascent into the magic of stardom and their serious and quick decline. But not into obscurity. Never will it be into obscurity. Obscurity is for the less talented who managed for a brief amount of time to snatch the airwaves until it was acknowledged they were less talented. Then plummeted, ever so quietly into obscurity. The Four Seasons will not ever go that route. Not as long as today’s young singers want to emulate them and be them and tell their stories on the stage. And certainly not as long as there are the hordes of us Baby Boomers to fill the auditoriums waiting for the first few bars of their glorious first song, Sherry. “Why don’t you come out. With your red dress on. Come out. Mmm you look so fine. Come out. Move it nice and easy. Girl, you make me lose my mind.”
