Arts & Society

Gary Tischler • December 7, 2011

I got a confession to make.

I’m a huge fan of the long-running CBS crime show “CSI” (for “Crime Scene Investigation”), the pioneering (first seen in October 2000) series set in Las Vegas, which spawned “CSI: Miami” and “CSI: New York.” I’ve always watched the original, mainly because I figured anything with Bill Peterson in it couldn’t be all bad, it had a cool theme song by The Who and it was set in Las Vegas.
Turns out that Robert David Hall is a big fan, too. The actor who has played Doctor Al Robbins, the chief medical examiner and king of the morgue on the show talks a little like a fan about the show, not even close to getting tired of the part, or the show, which has undergone numerous cast changes, top to bottom, over the years.

As these things often happen, he looks just like Doc Robbins, casually dressed, in a room at the Marriott in Woodley Park. There’s the doc’s characteristic white beard, the shiny top, compelling blue eyes, making him look younger than the 65 years he carries well. There’s a walking stick lying on the floor by the table we’re sitting at, the only immediate evidence that he’s also an actor with disabilities. In 1978, Hall, at the age of 30, lost both his legs and suffered major burns when his car was struck and crushed by a tractor trailer.

The good — and gruff, dark-humor loving, eccentric and not entirely PC—Doctor Robbins is also disabled and walks with the aid of a crutch and uses prosthetics, like Hall. Sometimes, Robbins has been seen in the show using a crutch like an air guitar and even singing with Bill Peterson, the original star of the show who played Grissom.

All of this, of course, speaks to his presence in Washington, a place he’s pretty familiar with. This time, he’s here as one of the recipients of the 25th Anniversary Victory Awards, given by the National Rehabilitation Hospital to individuals “who best exemplify exceptional strength and courage in the face of physical adversity.” He was among five honorees that include country singer Mickey Gilley, U.S. snowboarding champion Kevin Pearce, opera star Marqita Lister and NRH founder Edward Eckenhoff.
Hall has been a tireless advocate for job equality and his fellow actors with disability. As he says, “If you support diversity and thinks shows should give a portrayal of what America truly looks like, then performers with disabilities must be included in the equation. People have been very good at being politically correct. But there has been an assumption that disabled actors could slow down production, can’t do this or that, or that people won’t want to see them on screen.”

Hall, of course, goes beyond that. He’s visited Walter Reed Hospital many times and talked with veterans of America’s Middle Eastern wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who have suffered disproportionately with loss of limb wounds.

“I don’t try to preach or tell them what to do,” he said. “What you’re there for as far as I’m concerned is to listen. And I think that’s what they want more than anything. They can see I know what it’s like. They’re not moping. And all I can say is that they will get over it, working every day, if they don’t give in to despair, if they have hope.”

Honored by the award, he’s also a little uncomfortable with the nation of “being some kind of brave and courageous hero.”

“I don’t see myself that way,” he said. “It’s a process. I like to think in all that time I’ve moved on quite a bit. Not entirely. Nobody does.”

“But what I am is Irish and that makes me stubborn. So, I’d say I’m stubborn and tough — not in a tough-guy sense, but hard and persistent, yeah, that’s okay. I got from my father and his father, Naval Academy guys.

He’s not a dweller on the past. What he is — and you sense this just walking into the room — is a guy looking for the next thing, the next word, the challenge. His eyes, a hypnotic blue, are alert-looking, interested and curious. He’s a talker, a story-teller. “Do something you’re afraid to do,” he said. “Accept challenges. Do something new, risky.”

“You know, you go to certain places from where you’re at, you know going to your job or the store, that kind of thing,” he says. “It drives my wife nuts. I don’t like routines, so I go a different way every time.”

Hall wanted to be a musician—“I played in bands, rock and roll folk.” He just cut an album. He has a voice made for acting, and for radio, and certainly music. If you don’t believe it, check out the YouTube clip from a “CSI” show in which Grissom and Robbins are cutting up a body and singing, and Hall sings the cause of death. It’s funny, but the voice carries and is grand, and could maybe wake the dead.

“CSI,” you can tell, has been a gift for him. He’s worked with everyone, those who starred and left, and those who stayed. No bad words here from him, not even about the other “CSI” shows. “You can say that, I won’t stop you,” he said. “I can’t. But we’re very competitive about status.”

“I got to be a regular halfway through the first season,” Hall said. “You know you’re doing good there when your face is on the opening credits.”

His character is kind of crotchety, off the wall, authoritative and funny. “I modeled him after my dad a little and a track coach in high school,” he said. “My dad was, well, okay, tough. Sometimes, I thought he was even mean. But I always knew he loved us, all of us. He just didn’t know how to do that touchy feely stuff.”

“You know, I’ve always got sort of back story in mind for the doctor,” he says. “It doesn’t matter to anybody. But on the Dec. 14 episode, just so you know, he’s going to take center stage. You’re going to meet the wife Judy (Wendy Drewson), and there’s a body at his house and a CSI investigation.”
It’s not hard to imagine Hall at the center of one or many of “CSI” episodes; what’s hard to imagine is this CSI without Hall.

“You know I look at days in terms of percentages, starting with 100 percent,” he said. “Today, it started out 100 percent because our plane landed safely and my wife is scared of flying. I got some aches and pains during the day, so it dipped a little but that’s all right. I like talking to people. It goes up.” [gallery ids="100416,113417" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

Needless to say, the holidays are upon us?the season of giving. And to declare that a work of art makes a nice gift is an almost banal platitude. Yes, art is pretty; it decorates our walls, enlivens our homes and adds flourish to our lives. But with a wounded economy that focuses our fiscal energies on more clearly practical priorities, art is frankly a dismissible commodity.

Art, however, has a stronger memory than almost any other possession and a presence that will outlast the times in which it was bought.

My grandmother recently passed away, and what I took to remember her by is a small painting she kept by her desk. It is not a very good painting?it?s a strange, miniature reproduction of a lesser-known Picasso from the artist?s blue period. She saw it every day and was fleetingly reminded of some small detail of her life, as I see it now and am reminded of her, typing feverishly away with a phone wedged in the crook of her neck against her ear.

Over the years, she gave me more gifts than I can recount?pencil sets and pocketknives when I was younger, clothes and books when I was older. None of those things are with me anymore, save perhaps a paperback or two. Her memory lives on through me, manifested in this silly little painting.
This is the value of a work of art. It carries with it an innate history, story and feeling that few other objects can. A work is brought into existence by the artist, but it is not brought to life until it is displayed and appreciated by its owner.

Washington has a remarkable gallery scene, many showcasing local artists, and all with quality work worthy of a city of this stature. While often dwarfed by the ostentation of the museums, they are vital to the culture and community of our neighborhoods. Even if it?s just to look and chat with the gallery directors, go enjoy them. There is much to admire. The galleries featured below represent just a fraction of what is out there.

**A Local Treasure: David Suter at Gallery A**
As an illustrator, David Suter has been on the D.C. scene for a while. A longtime op-ed illustrator for the Washington Post, among other national and regional publications, he was also a courtroom artist who sketched the Watergate trials in the 70s. His illustrations are immediately iconic, among the best examples of those lightly surreal, morally political, wonk-pop New Yorker-style ink drawings that us urbanites get such a kick out of. Suter is inherently attuned to the sentiment of his time and place, a mark of any great illustrator, from John Held?s lionized depictions of flappers and the jazz age of the 1920s, to the nostalgia of Norman Rockwell.

Suter has since moved on from his illustration work, and now works as a painter and sculptor. And while his subjects are more ambiguous and his mediums more expansive, the artist?s wit, humor, wonder and small-scale grandness remain ever present. His latest exhibition at Gallery A, ?Outside the Box,? offers a lens into what seems like the subconscious of a wholly and uniquely visual thinker.
His quirky craftsmanship and use of line carries over to sculpture remarkably, and in many cases the works look like highly technical 3D collages of driftwood and found objectry. The concision and clarity of the works again belie the outright intelligence, intellectual curiosity and effort it took to create them, like the work of architect I.M. Pei (who designed, among infinite examples, the East wing of the National Gallery), whose designs reference a larger context of its own space.

The sculptures are in an eternal relationship with its space and dimension, the visual information carefully?and in some cases sparingly?chosen for each piece. More so than many sculptures, the angle and distance from which you view them entirely alters your perception, lending the works a mathematical, MC Escher-like curiosity. ?Seated Person with Dog,? if viewed from a certain vantage point, looks like a tastefully arranged stack of carved wood and aluminum. But as you come around the sculpture, the splayed legs of the canine and erect posture of the seated owner slowly reveal themselves.

His paintings carry a hazy, nebulous quality, exploring the space of light and the repetition of shapes within scenes that are reminiscent of the dignified and near-detachment of Diego Rivera. They are paintings of glances, memories of a collective cultural subconscious that Suter forms just concretely enough to be able to make out its image. A woman sits by the bed of a small, sickly elder; a rooftop church bell; a nude woman dancing while a man plays piano, a seated skeleton watches on, and a windmill looms in the background.

This show is a tremendous gallery experience. Fun, unique, engaging and smart, Suter?s work will stick with you, follow you around. I found myself thinking about it for days afterward.
David Suter?s work will be on view at Gallery A, 2106 R Street, NW, through Dec. 31. For more information visit [AlexGalleries.com](http://alexgalleries.com).

**Welcome Back, Cross Mackenzie Gallery**
Rebecca Cross, gallery director of Cross Mackenzie, has opened the doors of her gallery?s new location in Dupont Circle. Her current offerings, featuring the work of local painter Tati Kaupp and sculptor Charles Birnbaum, bring exuberance and taste together for a vibrant but peaceful exhibition that deserves to be seen.

In her earlier work, the intense color palette of Kaupp reflected the light from her childhood years in Mexico and the southwest. And while her recent paintings are considerably darker?they look like the skies just before the storm breaks?they still look celebratory. There is a sense of lightness and air here: circles, floating shapes, dots and squiggles, which rise to the top of her canvases with weightless effervescence.

The paintings are layered with quilt-like patterns that dance across the surface of the canvas?compositions in some cases literally jump over onto adjacent canvases, creating an unusual and wonderful diptych effect. While at first they may seem almost too free, perhaps even childlike, it is soon replaced by a wonder that is likely shared by the artist. I warmed up to the paintings quickly, feeling simultaneously calmed and electrified, like watching a summer thunderstorm through the window.

The extravagant sculptures of Charles Birnbaum are made up of undulating and intertwined shapes that resemble deep sea coral and anemones, but with curiously sensual undercurrents. Patterned elements are stacked and layered, with protruding, tapered appendages and sensuous tendrils reaching dangerously away from the safety of the massed center.

Birnbaum uses paper in his clay to give the porcelain more tensile strength and flexibility to hold up to the delicate and taxing methods employed by the artist. He presses the clay into surface textures, then folds, bends, pulls and twists the elements into expressive forms that even those studied in the techniques of ceramics are unable to understand or replicate. With no reflective clear glaze, the white porcelain sculptures take on a bone-like quality, absorbing light as opposed to reflecting it. The final result is a body of work that reflects a beautiful struggle of abandon and control, the unrestrained indulgence of the undulating forms versus the technical discipline of working and taming the material.
The works of Tati Kauppi and Charles Birnbaum will be on display at Cross Mackenzie Gallery, 2026 R Street, NW, through Jan. 5, 2012. For more information visit [CrossMackenzie.com](http://www.crossmackenzie.com)

Robert Devaney • December 2, 2011

If one could have spied on a singular event illuminating America’s awesome firepower in intelligence, surely it was the OSS Society’s annual awards dinner last month. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel was electric with civilian and military leaders, young soldiers, sailors and marines, old spies, patriots and a trace of media. The main event: The 50th anniversary presentation of the William J. Donovan Award to Adm. Eric Olson and an off-the-record speech by CIA Director David Petraeus.

Olson, retired commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, whose last big mission was taking out Osama bin Laden, and the popular Gen. Petraeus, newly appointed U.S. spymaster, joined 600 others and the likes of such soldiers as the Masson brothers, Sgt. Thomas Costello, wounded in Afghanistan, and his wife Jennifer. Led by Maj. Gen. Victor Hugo, the night’s master of ceremonies, they saluted those who hold and have held America’s tip of the spear against her enemies. All rose to toast the U.S.A., the commander-in-chief, allies, the OSS, Bill Donovan, lost and missing comrades — and the ladies.

Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, who received the Donovan award in 2007, presented it to Olson, who spoke of the “OSS Simple Sabotage Manual” (Good read; check it out). The man of the night — who had been the longest serving SEAL on active duty, “a bull frog” — took part in Desert Storm and Somalia. His actions during the Battle of Mogadishu, recounted in “Black Hawk Down,” earned Olson a Silver Star. The admiral said the “New Normal” required clever people and solutions. He certainly was in the right place to find them.

The OSS Society is dedicated to those who served during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Operations and honors the memory of legendary Gen. “Wild Bill” Donovan, OSS founder. Tributes to Donovan are not overstated: “What a man! We have lost the last hero,” said President Dwight Eisenhower. Donovan’s OSS men have been described as “PhDs who could win a bar fight.” The OSS’s influence on today’s spies and special ops also cannot be overstated. Others awarded the Donovan prize include Presidents Eisenhower, Reagan and George H.W. Bush as well as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Lord Mountbatten, William Casey, William Colby, William Webster, Ross Perot — and Petraeus two years ago.

The society works to continue that influence, as it educates the public on “the continuing importance of strategic intelligence and special operations to the preservation of freedom in this country and around the world.” During the Oct. 15 gala, the non-profit debuted designs for the National OSS Museum — “telling America’s greatest untold story.” The OSS Society is hunting for locations — especially in Northern Virginia. Says its serious president Charles Pinck, tongue not entirely in cheek: “I’m responsible for a group of very dangerous senior citizens.”

Oh, and Petraeus’s speech? Not to worry: he basically thanked everyone and . . . well, the rest is off the record. [gallery ids="100407,113338,113330,113307,113322,113315" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird • December 1, 2011

On Nov. 14, Vice Skracic, Acting Ambassador of the Republic of Croatia, hosted a reception for invited guests, donors and sponsors of the 2011 Capital City Ball, which is held the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Board member Liz Sara thanked supporters. The Capital City Ball raises funds to combat human trafficking. In his remarks, the acting ambassador said that Croatia is a transit country for trafficking and is working with various groups to raise awareness of this scourge. Beneficiary organizations in and around D.C. are seeking to “bridge the gaps” by providing counseling, therapy and legal services to victims of trafficking. Capital City Ball founder and co-chair Bruce Freis said that the ball, now in its fifth year, is a “great party” that supports and creates synergy among its charity partners. [gallery ids="100411,113347,113398,113389,113380,113372,113357,113365" nav="thumbs"]

the Georgetowner •

On Nov. 17, The Georgetowner hosted its 2nd Annual Holiday Benefit and Bazaar presented by EagleBank. Residents, readers, and friends of The Georgetowner flocked to the beautiful George Town Club to shop at the bazaar and bet on silent auction items benefiting­ three community stars; Hyde-Addison Elementary, CAG, and Hope for the Warriors. Guests savored the George Town Club’s hors d’ oeuvres and the caviar/potato bar and enjoyed signature cocktails provided by Beam Global Spirits. [gallery ids="100408,113368,113317,113359,113350,113342,113327,113335" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Italian Pied Piper Luigi Diotaiuti, the chef and owner of the Dupont Circle restaurant that celebrates the best of Italian cuisine, held another cooking class and luncheon on Nov. 19, celebrating Piedmont in the series honoring the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification and his 15 years on P Street. The star attraction were the famous white truffles which Luigi abundantly shaved over stirred-to-perfection Acquerello Arborio rice. The lesson began with bagna cauda and concluded with beef stewed in Barolo wine. Given the generous pouring of the region’s signature wines, the participants were also pleasantly “stewed” as they ventured into the sunlight. [gallery ids="100405,113300,113257,113292,113284,113267,113276" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Ambassador of Hungary Gyorgy Szapary, a grandson of a former prime minister and descendant of a distinguished 16th century family, was feted by Nash and Aniko Gaal Schott at their elegant Wesley Heights residence Nov. 18. The former Deputy Governor of the Hungarian National Bank, and later Monetary Adviser to Hungary’s present Prime Minister Victor Orban, mingled with prominent Washingtonians including Georgetown’s Ed and Dale Mattias of the Carlyle Group, art and music patrons Jane and Calvin Cafritz, art collectors Ricardo and Isabel Ernst, Ambassador Lloyd and famed jewelry designer Ann Hand, Ximena and Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada, former President of Bolivia, Prince Ermias Sahle Selassi and Princess Mahisente H. Mariam and other glamorous attendees and ambassadors. The ambassador clearly has a stellar embassy guest list in order.
[gallery ids="100404,113255,113263,113272,113281,113237,113290,113299,113308,113247" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • November 29, 2011

Twenty five years ago, an unlikely phenomenon and juggernaut burst on the Broadway musical scene. It had a huge set including a giant barricade from which young revolutionaries battled the powers that be in a sort of Occupy Paris spectacle. It was based on a classic novel by Victor Hugo, it had enough death scenes to make Dickens weep, it had a brave and saintly hero named Jean Valjean and a relentless pursuer named Javert and it ran just about forever, unstoppable in spite of some critics who sniffed sentimentality in the air.

It was called “Les Miserables,” a big three-hour-plus musical and spectacle with an operatic score and plot, a Cameron MacIntosh production with music by Claude-Michel Schonberg and a book by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel.

Complete with a logo of a revolutionary waif, the show actually made its American and pre-Broadway debut at the Kennedy Center and it was a huge smash for all concerned, sparking perpetual U.S. and world tours and an amazing Broadway run.

And now it’s back in a 25th-Anniversary production that’s revved up, half an hour shorter, kinetic, energetic and replete with a youngish cast, some of whose members were likely not born when “Les Mis” first exploded on the scene.

For the younger members of the cast who play the parts of the dashing revolutionary leader Enjolras, the tragic Fantine, the student Marius, Cosette and Eponine, “Les Mis” may be a legend, but it will also be as fresh as “Spiderman” in terms of size and impact.

But for Richard Vida, a born-to-be-on-Broadway performer if there ever was one, “Les Mis” is a dream come true—again.

Vida, who started dancing and performing when he was still a kid, always wanted to be on Broadway and in musicals. And he’s got one of the juiciest parts in “Les Miserables,” that of Thenardier, the disreputably opportunistic, shameless landlord, gang leader and party crasher of the show.

“God yes, he’s vile, he’s disgusting, he’s a terrible human being,” Vida said in a phone interview. “That of course is what makes him a wonderful character to play, and I’ve played him before, but he never gets old. He’s a survivor—master of the house indeed, and when he’s on he tends to steal the show. You can’t help but be fascinated by him.”

“Les Miserables” arrives just in time to add a little musical flavor to the current goings-on in Washington and all over the city. Revolution is once again in the air as tent cities full of people with grievances sprout up everywhere, modern-day barricades as rebukes to the contemporary power structures.

“I think it’s all very fresh,” Vida said. “The digitalized backgrounds make for a very electric set, much different than before. It all moves a lot faster.”

“I do think I provide a little bridge for some of the younger people in the cast,” Vida, who is in his forties, said. “They don’t haves the context of the show’s history and why it had such an impact at the time. But we’re all family in this production—everybody helps everybody out. I really am enjoying this. You had that feeling at the curtain call that we had done it once again.”

Vida played Thenardier in the 1990s both as an understudy and in performance for a time on Broadway so he’s thoroughly familiar and steeped in “Les Mis” lore. “I was also very much aware of it when it first came to Broadway, it was a show everyone was talking about,” he said.

“I’m back at the Kennedy Center,” he said. “I was here with a revival of “Forty Second Street,” the one that had Dolores Gray in it.”

“I never wanted to be anything else except to be performing on Broadway, in theater, in musicals,” Vida said. “

Vida is used to the vagaries of the business—“I’ve always been performing, and you do all kinds of things—the perennial ‘Law and Order’ parts, which all actors in New York miss tremendously, voiceovers, shows that succeed, and shows that don’t.”

One of those that didn’t was a fairly recent mounting of “The Best Little Whore House Goes Public,” a sequel to “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” It didn’t go very public. “It ran for 11 performances,” he said. A very original and interesting show called “The Drowsy Chaperone,” which has not been seen in the Washington area, was very successful. “It was very unique; a kind of musical-within-a-play and it did very well.”

More than likely, the 25th anniversary production of “Les Miserables” did and will do very well. For Vida, he’ll remain the master of the house, the beggar at the feast and what a feast it is.

(You still have through this weekend to try and catch the 25th anniversary production at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.)
[gallery ids="100349,109442" nav="thumbs"]

Jeff Malet • November 28, 2011

FotoWeek DC kicked off with tasty food, drinks and dancing at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on Friday, Nov 4, 2011. FotoWeek DC has earned an international reputation as a premier photography event, and the Corcoran will play host to a variety of FotoWeek activities. The festival (Nov 5-12) comprises hundreds of participating events across D.C. at galleries, museums, embassies, and art spaces as the city comes together in celebration of the power and range of the photographic medium. [gallery ids="100370,110472,110467,110462,110457,110452,110447,110442,110481,110437,110485,110432,110489,110427,110493,110477" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

There’s a whole bunch of reasons why “Jersey Boys,” the show biz bio-musical of one of the most successful pop-rock groups ever, is still running strong on the road after opening on Broadway in 2005.

For one thing, as non-stop entertainment, the show just plain delivers, unless you listen to nothing but chamber music and prefer your drama to be flavored by Ionesco. You have to have a heart of stone not to be affected by the tale of the Four Seasons, a pop-rock group fronted by rangy singer Frankie Valli who churned out hit after memorable hit in the 1960s and beyond. Give a listen to “Sherri,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Oh What a Night,” “Walk like a Man” and two incomparable love songs “My Eyes Adore You” and “Can’t Take My Eyes off You,” among dozens of other hits.

If the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys were the dominant groups of the period of the mid-sixties through early seventies, Frankie and the boys were right behind them if not right up there with them. And they had their own special flavor, and their own story to tell, and it was a story about the boys from the neighborhood, specifically urban and suburban New Jersey, where the mob and the church held sway as role figures.

New Jersey and the mob, wise guys, priests and lounge singers, are of course strong in the imagination of the American public from the films of Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppolla, to “The Sopranos,” to the current “Boardwalk Empire” and, God help us, to the annals of Snookie and The Situation.

“Jersey Boys” is almost a classic rags-jail-time-to-riches story of the kind Hollywood used to deliver routinely, starting off with the founder and eventual destroyer of the group Tommy DiVito (a sharp turn by John Gardiner), who, between jail stints, stubbornly kept trying to put together a group that would take him and his friends out of the neighborhood.

That didn’t happen until he found the angel-voiced Frankie Castelluccio, soon to become Frankie Valli (not with a y), and then later, Bob Gaudio, a teenaged one-hit wonder composer (“Who Wears Short Shorts?”), who would provide the group with all of its string of hits.

Those hits were not generic rock and roll songs in the strictest sense of the word: they were pop songs created at a very high level, which is probably why you can see so many mouths lip-synching, whispering the lyrics in the audience. The songs have staying power every bit as strong as pop ballads from the Great American Songbook.

The music and the storybook merge together in this show which has a snazzy but sparse set, authentic clothes and tough talk from the era(s) it covers. You hear doo-wop music from the early sixties of the kind practiced by rock-star-wannabes, you hear a girl’s group called the Angels sing the thoroughly familiar “My Boyfriend’s Back,” but mostly you hear the playbook of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

And this group, the guys on stage at the National Theater, give off a vivid illusion of at least sounding maybe better than the originals, at least if all you know of the originals in performance mode are the scratchy offerings on YouTube. As rock and rollers, the Seasons are no Stones or even Beatles, although the guitar playing every now and then breaks off into some wild riffs. What Valli and Guido, the true creative forces behind the group, created was a unique sound, pitched by Valli’s high, high and higher notes, and then pulled together into harmonies that sweep over the audience like the kind of surf the Beach Boys rode in on.

Valli, in this show as well as in previous visits to D.C., is performed by Joseph Leo Bwarie – diminutive, with big, pitch-dark eyes and a voice to match Valli’s as well as a tangible stage presence as an actor. He doesn’t have Valli’s harder, masculine, handsome look but you could see why girls might swoon and want to mother and smother him. Those high notes, sweeping out of nowhere, put the soprano in “The Sopranos.”

The group’s story was of course full of strife, drama, hysterics, betrayals and jealousy, like any normal marriage of four guys with egos and talent. DiVito, never far from the wise guys, runs up a huge gambling debt (not to mention a tax lien), which Valli and the group decides to cover. Marriages fail, and Valli loses his talented daughter to drug addiction and overdose at 22. Things happen, and the fact that these guys are from Jersey, which is not quite heartland America but full of tough guys, tough love and heart, makes the show as affecting as the music alone.

At one point, one wise guy asks the guy holding the gambling debt, “Why aren’t these guys dead yet?” He says, “Well, we really like their music.”

Me too. And so will you.

(“Jersey Boys” runs at the National Theater through Jan. 7, 2012.)