Jersey Boys tells the rags-to-riches story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the Italian-American quartet of crooners from New Jersey (Noy Joysey) who sold a zillion singles in the early 1960s and whose front man is still performing today.

It has been a huge success on Broadway, it won four Tonys in 2006 and the original production continues to tour America. But does this kind of retro jukebox musical, with its soda-fountain nostalgia and American-dream undertones, appeal as strongly over here?

The brains of the band was Bob Gaudio, the keyboardist and song-writer, who said: “We weren’t a social movement like the Beatles. Our fans were the guys who were flipping burgers and pumping gas, and the girls behind the counter at the diner, real blue-collar workers.” This is precisely why their songs are so good - timeless, universal, boy-meets-girl ballads - and why trying to dig anything more out of them is likely to produce fairly mediocre results. The whole point about the Four Seasons is that they were ordinary guys, old-fashioned entertainers with no agenda, but this is a musical with pretensions to being a play, based on a book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, portraying an era, exploring conflicting psychologies, telling a story...

We’ve certainly encountered the story before. The struggle to form a band, to get a recording contract and radio airplay; musical and creative differences, sharkish producers and band managers, talented street kids getting rich and blowing the lot on girls and Cadillacs. The “Italian connection” might have been played up to add a darker, seedier edge, but, as three of the Four Seasons are still with us, perhaps this wasn’t possible. The men in black here are benign, avuncular figures, sipping bourbon in their private clubs and always ready to lend the boys a hand, when in reality we all know the mafia are an unpleasant bunch of pizza-faced bullies. One nice joke, though, is the manic little operator who trails Frankie and co in these early years, one Joe Pesci – yes, the Joe Pesci, Goodfellas’ “little Joey Fishes”.

Lavish success comes their way, they go on the road, girls are everywhere, wives are left behind to bring up the kids. Tommy DeVito, the guitarist, delivers his ultra-Italian philosophy of life: “Never lie to your momma and never tell the truth to your wife.” His other comically sour line is: “Marriage isn’t love. Marriage is you shaving while your wife sits on the toilet clipping her toenails.” In general, however, the laughs are thin on the ground, and the serious drama is cheesy.

As in the songs, you might feel there is a certain lack of emotional complexity, while the only character who really strikes you as an original is Gaudio. A female admirer asks him who the girl is in the song they’ve just performed - a girlfriend? No, he explains, she stands for all girls. “She’s what TS Eliot called an objective correlative.” Long pause, then she says: “You’re not from round here, are you?”

The performances are generally solid, and Ryan Molloy, as Frankie, has a voice that sweeps up from reedy whisper to hard-edged, auditorium-filling falsetto with magnificent ease. Many musical sets nowadays seem to be no more than stark metal stairs and walkways, so performers can run upstairs while singing at the same time, then throw their arms out wide when they get to the top. A little more lushness of scenery wouldn’t go amiss. There is real visual flair, though, in the back projections, with a New Jersey landscape of pylons and cooling towers silhouetted against an industrial orange sky, and big screens above projecting Roy Lichtenstein-style images of couples kissing or big girls crying, with speech bubbles and all.

You’d have to say that the Four Seasons’ stylistic influence on later pop and rock music is about nil, but the songs are timeless, if intensely old-fashioned, and you know far more of them than you think - Sherry, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Can’t Take My Eyes off You. Hearing them performed and sung this well makes Jersey Boys worth a visit.

Looting five decades of the pop archive to create new musicals needn’t be disastrous - think of Mamma Mia! or Buddy. At the other end of the scale, however, was last year’s cynical Desperately Seeking Susan, terrible even though it was based on the incomparable pop classics of Blondie.

Jersey Boys falls somewhere between these two extremes, but it does make you wonder, is no back catalogue safe? The only old rocker who must surely be immune from being turned into a musical is one Paul Gadd. “My Gang - The Gary Glitter Story!”

Editor's choice

• Desperados with avocados - a sort of Guy Ritchie film
• Live fast, die young: The 27 Club
• Madonna's 50 most memorable moments