The Jersey Boy croons on

The Four Seasons' backstory reads like the stuff of fiction - street toughs from New Jersey sing their way to the top without ever quite escaping their hardscrabble origins - and it seems ripe for dramatization. So it's not surprising that "Jersey Boys," the musical about The Four Seasons, has been a success.

But it might be surprising that it's been truly successful, a box-office hit that has won both a Tony Award and a Grammy award. It has also put frontman Frankie Valli back in the spotlight. He'll sing Wednesday at Raleigh's Memorial Auditorium, the same hall where "The Jersey Boys" played a successful run over the summer.

At 75, Valli keeps as busy as he wants to, playing about 90 shows a year. We caught up with him by phone from his home in Los Angeles before he hit the road again.

Q: So how close can you get to the falsetto voice you had 50 years ago? Are you coming to the show? Well, you'll find out when you get there. You do lose a note or two, but that's life. It doesn't seem as though it affects the show in any way, but I do have to work at it. The entire vocal mechanism is a muscle, so you have to work to keep it in good shape. Watch what you do, be careful; no smoky rooms, overeating, drinking, substance abuse or carousing at night. And you have to sing every day. It's exercise, like anything else.

Q: How involved were you in bringing "Jersey Boys" to the stage? I've been involved right from the beginning. From the meetings, putting the pieces together, going to the auditions and all of that. It's taken maybe 10 years to put together.

Q: Will there be a "Jersey Boys" movie? Probably, but not within the next year or so. Probably five or six years. We've been talking to movie people about it.

Q: After "The Sopranos," do you have any acting projects coming up? I just had some meetings last week with a producer, so there may be some roles in some things. The biggest problem is needing time to do these things. Between running a business, rehearsing, being on the road, there's just not a whole lot of time. I have to play it by ear. What I'd have to do is take time off, which probably would not be so terrible. But I certainly welcome the challenge.

Q: "Jersey Boys" has a lot about "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," your 1967 signature hit. Was there really that much resistance to that song? There was, for a lot of reasons. It was a different kind of record from anything we'd done before, and the record company was afraid I might be leaving the group. We recorded it, and it was in the can for more than two years. We basically had to force them to put it out, and the funny thing is it was not an instantaneous hit. A lot of people in radio did not believe in it, because it was a total departure, very challenging.

Q: How did "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" break through? We were working in Detroit at a club called the Rooster Tail, and we visited the big station right outside Detroit. The program director was a man named Paul Drew, so we brought the record in and he listened. "I don't hear it," he said. So we told him we were working at the Rooster Tail, come on down and be our guest. The audience reaction to that song was so unbelievable that he came backstage afterward and told us, "I still don't hear it, but there must be something to it to get that kind of reaction. So I'll play it for a couple of weeks." He did, and it broke out of Detroit. It's a standard, one of the all-time most-played songs. That's quite an achievement, especially for the writers and publishers - of whom, I am happy to say, I am one.

Q: Why did you prosper through the 1960s British Invasion when so many other acts did not? I think basically because we did what we really believed in. We weren't trying to copy the British sound. And we weren't alone. The Beach Boys, [The] Supremes, [The] Temptations, [The] Four Tops - quite a few did survive that whole situation. But I think it's very important to be innovative in a business like the music business. The Beatles were very innovative; we were innovative in what we were doing, and so was Motown, certainly. There was a freshness about it. Competition is a wonderful thing.

Q: What about the musical landscape today? One of the biggest problems today is there's not much radio anymore. I don't know why, though I have my suspicions. But when we were having hits in the '60s, radio had a top-40 format with jazz, gospel, country, R&B - everything from Sinatra to you-name-it. That has disappeared. Today radio is into the business of specializing and mostly plays just one kind of music.

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