Compendium shows, meaning musicals whose plots are usually an excuse to douse the ears of nostalgia freaks with archaic hits, aren’t my favourite tipple.

But there’s good reason why Jersey Boys is about to enter its third year on Broadway and is now crossing the pond. It has the character, the narrative interest and the sense of place – as the backcloth indicates, the industrial badlands west of the Hudson River – to rise way above its genre. There’s no doubting the background of Frankie Valli, Tommy DeVito and the other members of a group that had a New Jersey bowling alley and not Vivaldi in mind when in 1962 it changed its name from the Four Lovers to the Four Seasons.

All four, including the Bronx-bred Bob Gaudio, were at least as strongly shaped by their Italian-American roots as their famous British contemporaries were by the streets of Liverpool and, later, the ashrams of India. Indeed, there were times last night when I felt the performers were making even the Beatles sound somewhat lacking in musical texture. Since when did John, Paul or George have the soaring falsetto that Ryan Molloy’s Valli effortlessly produces?

On the face of it, the tale of the Four Seasons is rock-band cliché: poverty, rejection, triumph, drink, girls, marital troubles, debt, break-up and, much later, a brief and sentimental reunion. But the librettists, Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, have a fine eye for what’s unusual and extreme. DeVito, the moving spirit behind the group and (thanks to his love of gambling) its eventual destroyer, served time for breaking and entering.

A mafia mobster and a helpful, if sinister, godfather emerge from the shadows. And there’s the death of Valli’s daughter, seemingly from drugs, though that’s skated over, perhaps in deference to the man himself, who last night sat two seats from me.

It’s primarily his story. Molloy’s excellent Valli begins as a bashful nerd in what is, at first, a backing group that, even on tour, finds itself performing to “three Mexicans and a man with no nose” in the Nevada outback.

But it was he who saw the composing potential of Gaudio and insisted on his joining the group; he who insisted on repaying the zillions squandered by DeVito and, of course, he who brought style to Sherry, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, Bye Bye Baby and the other songs that came banging across the footlights last night.

In one of several amusing asides, the Beatles are dismissed as invaders whose fans put flowers in their hair and try to levitate the Pentagon. The point about Valli and his chums is that they sang to “the guys flipping burgers and pumping gas and the girls behind the counter at the diner”. They had a blue-collar feel as well as the high-octane energy that, last night, movingly ended with a wizened shrimp of a man coming on stage and hugging Molloy, Glenn Carter, Stephen Ashfield and the rest of Des McAnuff’s cast.

Yes, it was Frankie Valli.

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