Jersey Boys: the Audience is the Audience

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Three days after “That Dorothy Parker,” on Saturday evening, it was “Jersey Boys.” The two nights in between spent at Yankee Stadium for Red Sox-Yankees, dramatic performances also, full of anguish and expectation, if you’re a fan. More about that later.

The Big Chill was the first movie I remember to use popular music to win over the audience in such a big way. Remember Jeremiah was a Bullfrog. Forrest Gump did it too, not just with the music, but with the public events of our lives. The familiar tunes “win the audience over.” When the song appears, it’s like running into an old friend you want to see.

Here’s how I think it works. The familiar song sends each person into his or her own reverie because we’ve all heard the songs so many times and we have our own memories attached to the music, even if we can’t quite locate them. So, we feel like we’ve found something of our own that carries us through the performance. We’re participants. It’s almost unfair.

In “Jersey Boys,” it’s about music and the story behind the music. The audience becomes the concert audience of the play, where songs that we know are destined to become hits are just being tried out. We come with a list of expectations (a lineup of songs we want to hear) and this play satisfies them all.

It’s a rags-to-riches-to-dislocation story. The songs are so familiar and well done that as members of the audience we couldn’t help but cheer; we played our parts well. After the actors bowed to our standing ovation, the entire audience should have bowed… in “Jersey Boys,” you can’t have a performance without an audience.

Hey, that’s always true.