Melbourne: Jersey Boys walk like a man in Oz

Bob Gaudio, founding member of The Four Seasons, meets cast members of the stage show. Photo/ Mark Dadswell/Getty Images

Just don't call it a musical, Bob Gaudio says insistently. Then he sits forward, fixes his gaze on a hapless Melbourne radio hack, and adds with Tony Soprano-like conviction: "It's a drama with music."

Gaudio isn't even a New Jersey native but no one's about to argue. He is the songwriting genius behind The Four Seasons, the 60s crooners distinguished by Frankie Valli's three-octave voice. Their string of doo wop-inflected hits held back the British invasion in America before they hit the rocks - thanks to their New Jersey Mafia links - and rose again in the 70s on the back of disco.

Now he's reluctantly back in the limelight as the mentor for Jersey Boys, a surprise success to emerge from the torrent of pop-based musicals unleashed by Mamma Mia.

Aged 66, tall and slim with a healthy crop of silver hair, Gaudio is Downunder to oversee the Melbourne launch of the musical - ahem, biopic - which has collected Tony Awards, a Grammy and an Olivier Award since its Broadway debut in 2005.

Even by Melbourne standards the July 4 opening is a big deal. The Antipodean event capital is festooned with Jersey Boys banners, Gaudio has been feted by the state Premier, celebs are jostling for attention and media have been summoned in force. To cap it all there's an after-party for all 1500 guests, replete with vintage Cadillacs, prawn cocktails and devils on horseback.

Never short of entertainment, Melbourne's cultural cup is currently overflowing. Apart from Jersey Boys - at the appropriately vintage Princess Theatre which hosted Phantom of the Opera - the standouts include a major Dali retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria while the Melbourne Museum has the best collection of Pompeii artefacts to leave Vesuvius.

Hotel chains such as Accor are offering accommodation and ticket packages as the industry strives to emerge from a downturn brought about by global recession and setbacks such as the February 7 fires and swine flu hysteria.

But expectations are clearly highest for Jersey Boys, which is surprising mainly because the story of The Four Seasons has passed most of us by. It's not that Gaudio's songwriting skills (with collaborators including flamboyant producer Bob Crewe) lack anything alongside hit factories such as Abba or Queen. Far from it, with a back catalogue that morphed from those early falsetto novelties - Sherry, Big Girls Don't Cry, Walk Like a Man and Rag Doll - to the much covered Can't Take My Eyes Off You and the 1970s renaissance of My Eyes Adored You, December 1963 (Oh What a Night) and Who Loves You. Other credits include the Walker Brothers standard The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine, Patti LaBelle's Lady Marmalade and Silence is Golden for The Tremeloes.

It's more that the Four Seasons came and went in an era when pop stars weren't subjected to the 24/7 scrutiny of television cameras, Facebook pages and gossip columnists. The enduring image was of finger-clicking young men in suits with elastic vocal chords who sang ridiculously catchy tunes. The reality, of course, was rather different.

It's the back story which raises Jersey Boys an octave or three higher than those musicals which are little more than a nostalgic trip through hits linked by a barely traceable story - the kind Gaudio is at pains to distance Jersey Boys from.

So we get an industrial set of chimney stacks and metal - the unforgiving streets of Newark familiar to fans of The Sopranos (appropriate enough given Valli's late-career appearances as mobster Rusty Millio). All four members give their take on events. And the Mob links which would lead to the group's implosion are worn with pride from the start, with bass player Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi doing time in jail.

Yes, it's a warts-and-all story laced with tragedy but in the end, as Frankie says, "all there was was the music". And that blokish New Jersey bond which endured familial and financial disasters.

Up the hill at Melbourne Museum another disaster has travelled well. A Day in Pompeii features more than 250 artefacts wonderfully preserved from the 79AD eruption which entombed the town of 11,000 in layers of pumice and ash. It is, says guide Jessica Bendell, "a pretty good option if you can't afford to go to Italy."

Even if you have visited the excavations, the Melbourne exhibition adds layers of understanding. The objects - bronze statuettes of gods, an anchor, cooking pots, huge amphoras, gladiators' armour, body casts, frescos, translated graffiti, ornaments and jewellery - help build a picture of a civilised town, with a thriving agricultural and fishing trade, theatre and sporting events.

Video and interactive computer technology do the rest - the highlight being a 3D video depiction of the eruption from the early rattling of tiles and toppling statues to fire, raining ash and finally the scalding mudflows that engulfed the town.

The exhibition opened a fortnight ago and is expected to attract 200,000 in its four-month run.

Across the river at the National Gallery of Victoria, a rather more abstract collection of treasures is drawing similar numbers. Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire brings together more than 200 works from the world's two largest Dali collections, the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali in Figueres, Spain and the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida.

It's the most extensive Dali exhibition to make it to this part of the world and this allows a chronological presentation - from his teenage mastery of Impressionist techniques through Cubism, Surrealism, his flight to America and explorations of science and religion to his later revisiting of earlier works and themes.

There are paintings, sketches, photographs, sculpture, jewellery, costumes and set designs while old television footage neatly captures his mad-headed humour and runaway ego - and that absurd moustache. There are also two important films - Un chien andalou, which is recognised as the first Surrealist film, and Destino, his 1946 collaboration with Walt Disney.

What does it all mean? As our enthusiastic guide Laurie Benson points out, children recognise the humour in his works even if they (like most adults) miss the Freudian and religious symbolism and the in-jokes. The works, says Benson, can be appreciated for Dali's extraordinary mastery of technique as much as for their ambiguity. Or you could always hire the audio guide.

Geoff Cumming visited Melbourne courtesy of Tourism Victoria and Qantas.

CHECKLIST

GETTING THERE
Qantas has regular flights to Melbourne. See www.qantas.co.nz

CULTURE
Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire is at the National Gallery of Victoria until October 4 and costs A$23 adult and A$11 child.

A Day in Pompeii is at the Melbourne Museum until October 25. The price of adult A$20, child A$12 includes museum entry.

Jersey Boys is at the Princess Theatre. Ticket prices range from A$70 to A$110 but enquire about accommodation/ticket packages which start at $799 per person for three nights, flights and show tickets.

FURTHER INFORMATION
For more information on Melbourne and Victoria visit www.visitmelbourne.com/nz