Jersey Boys: It's not easy to play a legend

The thought of playing a legend who's still alive gave actor Christopher Kale Jones lots of butterflies last fall. He had been rehearsing for weeks as Frankie Valli in the musical "Jersey Boys," and fretted about how the pop icon might react to seeing himself depicted onstage.

"You kind of get the creepies up there -- it was nerve-racking and daunting thinking about it," Jones said by phone last week from Tampa, Fla., where he was performing.

While Jones worried about what his character would think, Valli quietly sneaked into a preview and watched the young actor try to capture his soulful falsetto. Valli later gave the actor his blessing, allowing him to "relax a little."

Jones, 29, and his three male co-stars in "Jersey Boys" had come to know the feeling of heightened nervousness quite well since they play the four singers in the 1960s supergroup Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

Most of the early members of that group, including Bob Gaudio and Tommy DeVito, are still alive. Nick Massi died of cancer in 2000.

The musical makes an arc from the Italian-American boys' working-class backgrounds in New Jersey and New York to their international stardom, breakups, divorces, brushes with the Mafia and more.

The show, with book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, won four Tony Awards in 2006. It previews Wednesday and opens Thursday at the Orpheum in Minneapolis.

Not all the members of the Four Seasons are as widely known as Valli. Gaudio, for example, stopped singing in the early 1970s, concentrating on songwriting. He slid out of the spotlight, even though his career was still going strong. So when Andrew Rannells, who plays Gaudio in the show, started doing research, he found very little.

"There isn't a lot of footage of him, so you have to piece together what kind of guy you think he is based on his bio," said Rannells, 29. Luckily for him, Gaudio is the musical's composer. "Once we got to the auditions and he started coming, that made it much more real and less intimidating."

For Rannells, sitting in the same room with Gaudio upped the stakes in an unexpected way.

"You feel way more aware that he's a real person, with a real life, and you take care because you don't want to make a fool of yourself, or your character," he said.

But he didn't need to worry.

Out-of-body experience

If the performers were nervous about playing icons, so were the icons about seeing themselves portrayed in a Broadway musical.

Gaudio likened the anticipation and intensity to the first time he heard his own music played on WABC-AM radio. It was the song "Short Shorts."

"I was 15, driving down the West Side Highway [in New York] and 'Short Shorts' came on," he said. "I had to pull over because it was an out-of-body experience. It's really indescribable, but you find yourself in tears without knowing it. I had that same feeling that first night the [musical] opened in La Jolla," Calif.

He said that after the initial nervousness about how it would turn out, it became easy to watch youngsters play the roles. "It's like looking at a live photo album. When you think of the span of our lives, that's a broad canvas for the show."

"We have to tweak it a little over here, not the music but the language," he said of the London show. "Instead of the john or the can, you say 'loo' or 'toilet' -- that kind of thing. It's pretty interesting, hearing a [British] cast sound so American. Yet when they walk offstage, you have to tune your ears and you still barely understand them."

Gaudio reflected in awe on his own career that started at 15, when he dropped out of high school to pursue his dream. Now he's in talks to put the show up in other places across the globe. "When I was a boy, there were only three choices for young kids like us -- the Mafia, the Army or music," he said. "If you stick around long enough, if you fight hard enough, you get to be at this place, I guess."

Rock-star treatment

If Jones and his fellow performers fretted about earning the approval of the icons they portray, fans have let them know they are doing well. They have been getting a certain rock-star treatment. Some fans, even some old enough to be his mother, have been throwing frilly personal items onstage.

"We certainly have a lot of fans who are from that era of free love," he said. "Many have reached the sensible age where they choose not to remove their underwear and throw them onstage. What's great about the show is that it is like a sense memory, like a certain sweet smell, that takes you back to the place you were when you first experienced it. That's powerful stuff."