Jersey Boys writing team almost cancelled fateful Manhattan lunch with Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio
When Rick Elice suggested to Marshall Brickman that they write a musical about the Four Seasons, Brickman responded deadpan: “I’m a big fan of Vivaldi, but is it really a musical?”
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WHEN Rick Elice told Marshall Brickman they should write a musical about The Four Seasons, Brickman was quick on the return. “I’m a big fan of Vivaldi, but is it really a musical?” Brickman told his friend.
Brickman wasn’t a joke writer for Johnny Carson for nothing. Or co-scriptwriter with Woody Allen of Annie Hall and three other movies.
Elice, of course, didn’t mean the Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi. He meant Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, a band of four New Jersey guys who broke out of their tough immigrant backgrounds to create one of the very few American groups to survive the so-called British Invasion of the 1960s, when The Beatles and others commandeered the charts.
Elice, a high-flying Manhattan adman and writer, and Brickman went on to write the book, or libretto, for the hit musical Jersey Boys. It told the story of Frankie Valli, Bob Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi who were products of New Jersey, born and bred.
But if Elice and Brickman had cancelled a fateful lunch in Manhattan where they met up with Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio for the first time, the musical might never have been realised.
“I got a phone call from a guy (Broadway producer Michael David) who said he wanted to do a show using The Four Seasons music,” Elice says.
The band had shot up the charts with numbers such as Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, Walk Like A Man, and Take Good Care Of My Baby.
“(David) said, ‘why don’t you have lunch with Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio?’,” Elice says. “I said, ‘can I bring my friend Marshall?’, and he said ‘sure’. You know, if you work in the theatre a free lunch is never to be scoffed at.
“So Marshall and I had this lunch date. It probably was something we would have cancelled at the last minute if we’d remembered the day that it was happening.”
Remembering at the last minute that lunch was on, Elice and Brickman turned up at a “gloomy Italian restaurant in mid-town Manhattan”.
“There at the back of the restaurant were these two very, very dapper Italian
guys,” Elice says.
“Then there was that awkward moment when you’re sitting with strangers and you’ve got nothing in common with them and the food hasn’t yet arrived. We said, ‘so what was it like to be you?’ ”
As Valli and Gaudio talked, the two writers were increasingly drawn in to the incredible story of growing up in a tough New Jersey neighbourhood where daily life was heavily infiltrated by the Mafia. One of the band, DeVito, had even ended up in the perilous position of being unable to repay a Mafia loan.
“It sounded like an episode of The Sopranos, but with better music,” Elice says.
“We pitched this idea that they should let us dramatise their lives, which were already pretty dramatic without our help,” Brickman says.
“Since they’re Italians, they’re very sharp in business. They said, ‘sure, go ahead, knock yourselves out. But if we don’t like it, we’re going to pull the plug’.
“We worked for many, many months putting together a story based on conversations with them, with the knowledge that at any moment they could spring the trap and we would be out there naked with nothing to show for it.”
When Frankie Valli finally saw the show, he wept — “probably for the first time. He’s Italian,” Brickman says.
Jersey Boys opened on Broadway in 2005 and has been performed extensively, including in Sydney. It returns next week at the Capitol Theatre, with the lead roles filled by Bernard Angel, Cameron MacDonald, Thomas McGuane and Glaston Toft.
And none of this would be happening if two smart Manhattan writers had decided that day to
cancel lunch.
Jersey Boys, from August 29 to November 1, Capitol Theatre, jerseyboys.com.au