By JOHN BENSON

Special to The Gazette

Broadway writer Rick Elice will be the first to tell you he’s a quintessential Upper West Side New York City snob.

“I’m a rare born and bred New Yorker,” said Elice, calling from the Big Apple. “I’m an overeducated, overindulged, over-privileged, overanalyzed New Yorker who was brought up being told don’t even look to the west because New Jersey was kind of the joke state for us.”

Little did the theater veteran know that across the Hudson River in the Garden State, fate and fortune were conspiring to motivate Elice and Academy Award winner Marshall Brickman into bringing the story of Frankie Valli, Bob Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi to Broadway.

The Tony Award-winning musical “Jersey Boys,” which makes its Cleveland debut June 18 through July 20 at the State Theatre, began in earnest in the spring of 2002 when the two writers sat down with Valli and Gaudio in the back of a dark Italian restaurant on 46th Street in New York.

“They started telling us the story of their lives, and we just sat there,” Elice said. “They started talking, and it was just what they call in England a ripping yarn. We’d say things like, ‘Really, that happened? Are you kidding? You mean you came off stage and were taken right into a paddy wagon?’ That kind of stuff.

Featuring Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons’ big songs “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)” and more, “Jersey Boys” opened in November 2005 in New York and was instantly a smash hit.

The musical, which details how a group of blue-collar boys from the wrong side of the tracks became one of the biggest American pop music sensations of all time (selling more than 175 million records worldwide), touched a nerve with audiences.
Elice went out of his way to talk about why he’s excited about the “Jersey Boys” Cleveland debut.

“In a way, The Four Seasons is like a house band for Cleveland because they were 1990 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, and back in the day they sold a ton of records there,” Elice said. “So I think there’s a really big fan base for this music in Cleveland, and the music is what should really get them to come in, while the story is what will get them to leave saying, ‘Wow, this is a great night.’”

Tickets for “Jersey Boys” run $24.50 to $130 at Tickets.com outlets. For show times and more information, call 216-241-6000 or log on to www.Tickets.com.

Benson may be reached at ididhear@aol.com.

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