The Grand Opera House in Belfast have a ‘friends’ scheme and for a fee you get a list of benefits (2 for 1 tickets, offers, 10% off food and drink), one of these benefits is that you get two tickets to try “something new” and that something new for me was New Jersey Nights.
The premise is simple, rather than trying to shoehorn the songs of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons into a convoluted plot that makes little or no sense but to justify a song, like Mamma Mia, they just play the songs! Brief context is given in between tunes – a kind of mini history lesson – and they are performed chronologically but other than that they let the music do the talking. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons have a list of hits as long as your arm, more specifically if that arm belonged to Stretch Armstrong so we were sure to be in for a good night!
The 4 piece band is accompanied by 3 male and 3 female dancers alongside 4 male singers who rattle through the hit catalogue of Frankie Valli, most of which seem be sung in a high pitch that would put Justin Timberlake to shame – so high infact that at one point during the acapella section they have to stop a song after 30 seconds because the lead began in “a key that even chipmunks couldn’t sing in”.
There appears to be great chemistry between the leads as they banter and joke their way through the performances; interacting and joking with the audience – an audience that is finding it hard to stay in their seats, and not long into the second act a small dance party breaks out on the left hand side of the Grand Opera House stalls.
There seemed to be only 2 songs in the whole performance that I’m not familiar with, which is a great track record for a band that I wouldn’t have pegged myself as a fan of. As songs like – Let’s Hang On, Walk Like a Man, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Grease and Stay come thick and fast you begin to wonder when the hits will run out. Short answer is they don’t, with only a brief interlude to showcase two of Phil Spector’s biggest hits of the time by girls groups, other than that they just keep on rolling.
As the night comes to a close, and they invite the audience to get up and dance in their seats, the crowd jumps up like they’ve been restrained all night. They finish it all off with a medley of hits from throughout the show and wish us goodnight with a Bye Bye Baby (sorry couldn’t resist).
New Jersey Nights is on until Sat 8th Mar and tickets are still available here.
