From Stage to Screen: Adapting Jersey Boys

Jersey Boys is the story of the rise and fall of The Four Seasons, the “clean-cut,” all-American rock band that actually had two ex-cons and enough mob connections to satisfy a Scorsese film. Yet in the early 1960s the band sold themselves as the (Jersey) boys next door, and created some deathless tunes in the process.

Jersey Boys began it’s life, of course, as the Tony Award-winning juggernaut that became the 13th longest-running show in Broadway history when it played its 3,487th performance this past April 9th.

John Lloyd Young is Frankie Valli in Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys

For a Broadway debut, it doesn’t get any better than winning the coveted quartet of stage awards. Such was the case for John Lloyd Young, who took home the 2006 Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World Awards for lead actor in a musical following his stellar, if not life-altering, turn as Four Seasons frontman Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys. Young left the show in 2007, but reprised his role for short engagements both on the Great White Way and most recently London’s West End.