INTERVIEW: ‘Oh What a Night’ — ‘Jersey Boys’ moves off-Broadway
Jersey Boys, the successful musical that depicts the life and career of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, continues to earn standing ovations in New York City. After shuddering its Broadway run, following a multi-year residency, the show has moved a couple blocks away to off-Broadway’s New World Stages complex. That means audience members can still check out the story of Valli, Bob Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi, and listen to those memorable songs, such as “Who Loves You,” “Sherry” and “December, 1963.”
Cory Jeacoma, a veteran of Jersey Boys’ touring production, is currently portraying Gaudio in the production.
“Honestly, I don’t even remember how old I was, but I was in my teens,” the actor said in a recent phone interview. “It was while I was in high school. I went and saw one of the touring productions of the show at the Kravis Center in Florida. I believe it’s in West Palm Beach, and I got hooked, man. It’s a guy’s show, and it’s about four blue-collar guys. And it was a story that I believed in.”
Jeacoma has a personal connection to the Four Seasons’ music. His father, while growing up, would listen to the quartet’s music and sometimes cry while “Sherry” played.
“His brothers used to tease him with the high falsetto, the Fankie Valli falsetto,” Jeacoma said. “And my dad, it triggered something in him that he would always start crying, so my dad used to always tell us this story growing up. And so then I saw the show, and throughout the years, I would see it more and more. And then when I graduated college, my first audition out of college was for Jersey Boys, and I booked it. And then my dad sat in the audience and was crying during ‘Sherry,’ but for a very different reason.
Jeacoma met the real-life Gaudio, who wrote the music for the Four Seasons, only a few weeks ago. The experience was a bit daunting because the actor was trying to respectfully and accurately portray the singer on stage. However, almost as soon as he met Gaudio, Jeacoma took a sigh of relief.
“He is the nicest guy in the world,” Jeacoma said. “He is the epitome of cool, and he truly just wants the show to be the best it can be. And he supports everybody in it, and he’s a huge fan of everybody in it, just as much as we’re a fan of him. He’s the uncle of the show, the dad of the show. It’s really cool.”
Jeacoma believes he was cast in the show because his own personality bleeds into Gaudio’s character a little bit. That was likely the intention of the casting company: Find actors who can play real people not caricatures.
“Frankie Valli, Tommy DeVito, Bob Gaudio are still alive,” Jeacoma said. “While Nick Massi has passed, he’s still a real person who was living and breathing, so they want someone who is going to be able to bring that reality to the character. I bet if you asked any of the guys, if you asked Mark Edwards [Massi] or Aaron De Jesus [Valli] or Nicholas Dromard [DeVito], any of the guys who have played these roles, they would say that they have a little bit of what we call character hangover where we bring the characters home with us a little bit. I would like to say that I have a little bit of Bob Gaudio in me in terms of the fact that I’m forward-thinking and a little too earnest in the sense that I try to see the best in people, when sometimes I probably shouldn’t.”
Jeacoma has played in regional productions at the Fulton Theatre and Main Street Music Theatre. He participated in Lincoln Center’s Sinatra Centennial Concert and graduated from Pace University’s musical theatre program in 2016.
His journey to this off-Broadway production included time in the Jersey Boys national tour, and that means he has a unique perspective on some of the modifications that have occurred to fit the show into New World Stages.
“To the untrained eye, you would go and see the show and say, this is a Broadway show, but for the people who have seen it — we have fans who have seen it hundreds of times, and we have people who have been in the show for years and years — so those people will notice little, tiny differences such as parts of the set have changed,” Jeacoma said. “The infrastructure of the show has changed a little bit, the skeleton I guess you could say. It’s a bit smaller of a cast. We have people playing multiple roles.”
He added: “The show is exactly the same though. The script hasn’t changed. The music is all the same. Nothing was cut from the show. It’s literally just a little bit smaller so that it fits into the space that we’re in. There’s a little less foot traffic backstage, but it’s nothing that the audience would notice because, especially with this company, man, we really have a phenomenal company that is just working their tails off and bringing it every single night.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Jersey Boys, directed by Des McAnuff and written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, is currently playing New World Stages in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
