After those sagging lines of hagio-graphic tribute musicals to old rock'n' rollers and bland bands, what a refreshing change to meet up with this Broadway triumph.

Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman, best known for his Woody Allen film scripts, have injected regular slugs of trenchant truth-telling into their musical biography of the blue-collar, Italian-American group from New Jersey. Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons scored big hits in the Sixties which have given them golden oldie status for decades.

Valli, the lead singer with the soaring falsetto, whose vocal range and gymnastics are here brilliantly recalled by Ryan Molloy, may have been as clean as driven ambition allowed. But he admits in a programme note that as "younger kids" the group were not exactly strangers to "trouble". The musical demonstrates in the sometimes tense spaces between doo-wop and R and B songs with pop chorals, how the boys variously spent spells in jail, maintained Mafia connections, cultivated gambling debts and unpaid tax bills, quarrelled violently over one prized girl in particular, suffered the drug-related death of a daughter and finally fell apart.

The group's swaggering founder, Glenn Carter's Tommy DeVito, outraged his Four Seasons room-mate Nick Massi by only changing his under-wear every third day and regularly urinating in hotel wash-basins. It seems also that the group's hit songs, such as Sherry, Big Girls Don't Cry, Walk Like A Man and Bye, Bye Baby were conservative and timeless, more about urging both sexes to put on the right, macho show, than describing the struggle to make it after being brought up in New Jersey.

On a stage displaying the now traditional furniture for musicals - a steel-framed scaffold, with steel-mesh screens, spiral stair-case and upper gallery - Jersey Boys unfolds against a backcloth of industrial chimneys, telegraph poles and lush sunsets. Pop art on LCD screens and neon signs help set the changing scene as the Four Seasons tour their way into manual-worker, American hearts. The group appealed to "guys who were flipping burgers and pumping gas and girls behind the counter at the diner".

Des McAnuff 's slickly animated production takes far too long to reach the glory days, having spent excessive time with Carter's DeVito, the tough-talking, self-admiring founder who recruits Frankie and song-writer, Stephen Ashfield's oddly insipid Bob Gaudio. The show does, however, at last fly high with some of those hit anthems, dynamically staged.

Molloy exercises an arresting, powerhouse of a voice, that ascends from tenor to falsetto in emotional bounds and scores with Fallen Angel, sung for Frankie's dead daughter, his back to the audience. It is Frankie, too, who vainly fights to keep the group together, while Philip Bulcock's ironically charismatic yet peripheral group member charts the reasons for the group's break-up with laconic flippancy.

Still I do doubt whether Jersey Boys will make it over here. The life-stories and the songs strike me as being curiously timeless, remote and unreverberative for British audiences. This may be an American import too many.