Why didn’t anyone tell me sooner that Jersey Boys is so good? I guess it did pick up its fair share of Tonys in ‘06 (including Best Musical), but I have a distinct bias against jukebox musicals, especially after having to sit through the execrable The Times They Are A-Changin’, and always dismissed the show as just another example of a genre I wouldn’t mind seeing chased out of town. So I went to Sunday’s Actors’ Fund benefit pretty reluctantly, but I’m really glad I did.

There’s something incredibly genuine about this show’s exuberance–possibly because it comes from the music itself, and not from whipping the book into a frenzy. The book scenes in Jersey Boys are actually pretty laid-back: one might even, every now and then, call them subtle. They do give notably short shrift to the female characters, but sort of in the same way that Martin Scorsese movies do, which is with a sense that the issues on the table are men’s issues. This is really a show about music, but second to that, it’s a show about men: much is made of how different the guys of the Four Seasons were, and how they came together because they (kind of) got along and because music was their shot to make it out of the Old Neighborhood–how they did it, as American men have done from time immemorial, to give their kids a better shot than they’d had and ended up living with strangers when they were home at all. Because the show works with a time-tested prefab score, it neatly sidesteps the maudlin, forgettable music that’s been bringing down new musicals left and right. Jersey Boys makes the disjunction between the music and the book an advantage by letting the book scenes run as a subtextual undercurrent through the continuous thread of the performances, which comes to seem, to the Four Seasons and their audience both, as the realest thing going (what’s realer to an audience than being performed to directly?). It’s a neat merging of form and function that helps to inculcate the audience into the mindset of the characters.

I saw understudy Cory Grant (Cory, not Cary) as Valli, and he struggled mightily with the Jersey accent (I tend to think that accents are overvalued, but you just can’t get past an obtrusive accent-attempt) and lost–the second act was a wee bit less enjoyable than the first because it rested so heavily on his shoulders, and he just wasn’t great in book scenes (not just because of the accent). The second act dips a little also because it spends more time than the first on that jukebox-musical technique of drafting kinda-relevant songs into the service of the plot, rather than just performing them, as it largely did in the first act. There’s a clever hedging technique of making the songs performances with plot resonance, as in “Beggin’” and “Let’s Hang On (To What We’ve Got),” but “Fallen Angel” is a big misstep: a lesser song appropriated into a sappy, unnecessary number. Still, this show works with its source material way better than any other jukebox musical I’ve ever seen (note: I’ve never felt the need to see Mamma Mia!). Other than Grant, the cast is very solid–the casting director deserves a medal for doing a tough job well–and it’s nice to see a musical with so many original cast members staying on this long. I was particularly taken by J. Robert Spencer (as Nick Massi), whose lanky lightness makes the Ed Sullivan-approved dancing fresh and compelling, but all three regular Seasons are fun to watch, and nicely differentiated, and a couple of supporting actors give satisfyingly plummy performances.

Perhaps the thing by which I was really so taken is the fact that these characters mostly aren’t fleshed out with a lot of talking–they’re fleshed out with the songs they sing and the way they sing them, their wildly divergent dance styles as they rattle through the same moves in unison. It’s just very enjoyable to watch, and you don’t feel like you’re being beaten around the head with character development, the way you do in many a musical. It’s lovely. Jersey Boys is very devoted to the ideal of entertaining an audience, and it’s nice to see that interpreted as a job to be done carefully and well, rather than just a lazy willingness to distract from a hollow core with the old razzle-dazzle.

While a great many theater critics seem able to forgive a musical anything because of its “joy,” my blackened little heart just can’t–and for that reason, I appreciated the unexpected subtlety of Jersey Boys. I could have done without the random pop-art scenes that descend from the flies periodically, but that’s small-potatoes quibbling, and the screens were also used for really effective archival video footage. But given how many of the musicals I’ve seen in recent years have been badly done from soup to nuts–badly conceived, written, produced, cast, designed, staged–the fact that the various members of the Jersey Boys team have identified their jobs and done them thoroughly comes to seem a blessing, and a nice complement to the themes of workmanlike artistry that are the show’s center. It’s a nice, compact package, and I’d see it again tomorrow.

P.S. It doesn’t have a plot, really, beyond the usual “what goes up must come down.” For unknown reasons, I didn’t mind so much, but if plotlessness is your pet peeve…look elsewhere.