New Jersey Nights

Like everyone else my age (ish) the music of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons was the background to my growing up ... actually, thinking about it, until their 1970's jits it was just that, a backdrop, an underscore, rather than the theme. Looking at the list of hits we were going to be offered though, I realised quite how much I remembered those songs and quite how much they still make me smile. This really is a show for an audience of a certain age ;-)

So what sort of show is it? Well, mostly a concert of these great songs with a little bit of information thrown in occasionally to give us context as we moveed through the decades. The singers have great voices but this was not "tribute" in the sense of reconstruction, close your eyes and it was not FV, just a good concert.

The dancers danced but somehow added nothing, this is rock and/or roll not cruise ship cabaret and it needed less precision and more passion ... or at least a little eye contact. But the real problem I had all evening was with the sound quality .. listen to those old Frankie Valli records, they are crisp and clean, the vocals stand out, its all about the voices - what we were given was overloud instrumentation with a muddy quality to the whole thing that made listening quite difficult. I know this is auditorium-live rather than studio-recorded but even so, I have seen plenty in the Hippdrome that have managed a considerably cleaner sound. A band of drums, sax and guitar with everything else provided on track or "Roland" also does scant justice to the richness of the originals and the decision to play most at the same speed was a little odd. When the girsl did (live or mimed, couldn't tell) a couple of Phil Spectre's it was like they had been crushed under a collapsing wall of sound ... not pretty.

I did wonder what SoundHound would have made of these renditions, would it have actually recognised the? Being a good audience member not even that experiment was enough to make me turn on my phone during a show!

It had never occurred to me before, "Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons" implies five people but there were only ever four ... ;-)

Plenty of memories, some fun, good songs well sung (except if, like me, you're a little bit ocd. about the Blue Moon bass line!) and much enjoyed by the audience ... for me, it just missed the mark