‘Jersey Boys’ prepares for opening of second Syracuse run

Boots track quietly across the stage of the Landmark Theater, their owners moving set pieces and cracking jokes at each other.  Figures hunch over desks, lit up by hundreds of lights and buttons. The theater has been dark for two weeks in preparation for its opening this week.

“Jersey Boys” will open at the Landmark Theater on Thursday for the show’s second run in Syracuse. After two weeks of set building and rehearsals in the space, the show will have a short run of four nights before moving on to Cleveland by Tuesday.

The musical details the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons and their rise to fame. Richard Hester, the 12 year production supervisor for the show, said 90 percent of what is shown on stage actually happened.

When Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio first had the idea of producing a jukebox musical based on their songs, they were not met with enthusiasm, Hester said. Other than “Mamma Mia,” jukebox musicals were not experiencing success. Now, “Jersey Boys” has been playing on Broadway for nine years.

Hester said he thinks the show has experienced this level of success because, unlike other musicals, the story is not told through the songs. Instead, the story is told and song are incorporated along the way. These songs are treated as stand-alone performances, just like the shows Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons gave over the years.

The nature of the show’s storytelling allows for a very simple set, which makes it easier to travel from city to city. Rather than packing up and transporting a huge set, the team works with a collapsible set that is set up to look larger than it is. The show doesn’t live and die by the set, Hester said.

One of the biggest challenges, Hester said, was making the few set pieces function as similarly as possible to those of the Broadway show. Although Hester described the Landmark as “a first-class touring theater,” the production team faced some difficulties.

Broadway theaters are characterized by big budgets that allow for trap doors and rotating sets. However, the Landmark doesn’t boast such luxuries, and as such, the set team needed those two weeks to figure out how to put the show up on a smaller scale and budget.

Though the Broadway production of “Jersey Boys” will close soon, the touring production of the show is still on the road. Hester said that despite the old fashioned bubbling of doo-wop music featured in the show, it still appeals to all ages.

“In some ways, the Four Seasons was the original boy band,” Hester said. “The audience for the Four Seasons were 14 to 20-year-olds, that’s who their core audience was, and that’s who is coming to see the show now.”

Hester described how many modern artists are using styles and sounds similar to the Four Seasons’ in their music.

“While it sounds like it’s going to be grandpa’s music, it’s not. It’s their music,” Hester said. “There’s no difference in it.”