Artist Spotlight: Pablo David Laucerica of ‘Jersey Boys’

When Jersey Boys returns to close Season 107, Pablo David Laucerica will make his Muny debut as Frankie Valli, singing songs that have been part of the actor’s life for years.

The Tony Award-winning jukebox musical charts Valli’s rise with The Four Seasons, from the streets of New Jersey to international stardom. Packed with hits like “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” “Dawn” and “My Eyes Adored You,” it’s a story of brotherhood, ambition and the price of fame.

Jersey Boys was last seen at The Muny as part of the 2018 centennial season.

We caught up with Laucerica on a break from rehearsals to chat about music, love and what it means to play such an iconic role on the iconic Muny stage.

Q • This is your first time at The Muny. What are you enjoying about the process so far? 

A • What I’m most fascinated and inspired by is the fact that it is such a quick turnaround. And it is the classic case of “it takes a village.” It takes a lot of trust on behalf of the actors, carpenters, wigs, hair, makeup, choreographer, everybody, to know what the task is and get it done. Everyone’s very well prepared by the time they get here and willing to work. 

Q • Have you bonded with your Four Seasons “bandmates”?

A • Big time, very quickly. The first full day that all four Seasons were here, we went to the movies. We went to see The Fantastic Four because I thought that was appropriate. And almost every other day, me and The Four Seasons are going back to the hotel to review material but also just hang out. 

Q • You’ve played Frankie Valli before. What do you love about this character? 

A • I was just talking with [director] Maggie Burrows about this. Although Frankie is the “hero” of the show, there are no heroes. It is about four people who come from a very specific place, who get exposed to fame at such a young age. Fame and money can corrupt, but it shows you who you are. Those kinds of things show you the kind of person you are when you buckle under pressure, and everybody deals with it in a different way. 

The thing I love about Frankie the most is that I relate to him in a lot of ways, because a throughline of the show is how Frankie just loves the sound. He just loves music. Ultimately — and it is his downfall — his love for music drives him to the point where he can sacrifice some of his interpersonal relationships because he wants to perform. Where he is most himself is when he is singing, and that is something I relate to in a lot of ways. 

Q • Have you ever met or heard from the real Frankie? 

A • No, I haven’t. I have been told — because I’ve done the show with folks who are Jersey Boys alumni — all the stories of meeting Bob Gaudio, some of the folks who actually got to meet Frankie, but I’ve never had the opportunity. I would love to, though.

Q • How did you react when you learned you would play Frankie at The Muny? 

A • I freaked out. I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom — stretching, I believe — and it was the day after my callback. I left the callback thinking: “Oh, it’s going to take at least a week. It’s going to be somebody else. This is probably not going to work out for me.” But then my agent calls me, and he’s like, “So, you got it.” I was elated, and he told me about some of the nice things the team had to say, and I was honestly just so excited to do this role again. 

This is a role that I immediately felt attached to, because I grew up listening to The Four Seasons, but I also grew up listening to Jersey Boys, the original Broadway cast album. So it’s a show that I will never not love. Any opportunity to do it, especially at The Muny, on a stage this big for an audience this large, who you know will know this music. To know how much this music means to people, and to do it on a scale like this, is fascinating. It is just so beautiful to me. It’s so moving to be able to do that. 

Q • Have you done any special training to perfect your take on Frankie’s unmistakable falsetto? 

A • Funnily enough, I went to school for opera — I was trained classically my whole life. I did the musical theatre certificate program at Northwestern, where I also got my opera degree. So I was mostly studying music, but then I did theatre classes on the side. But I grew up listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Freddie Mercury, The Four Seasons and The Beatles, and I just got so used to it at a young age, because I knew I was a tenor at a pretty young age. I also sang in a barbershop quartet in middle school and high school, and I did a cappella in college. Falsetto is just something you have to train for. With Frankie Valli’s iconic voice, The Four Seasons used falsetto, which was typically meant for background singers, and put it at the forefront. Being able to do it here felt like, “Oh, wow, I feel like my voice has been trained for this.”

Q • Do you have a favorite song or scene from Jersey Boys? 

A • My favorite song is “Let’s Hang On,” both musically and dramatically, because it comes at a point where Frankie is starting to lose some of what he felt at home with, with the band. Right before this song, Tommy leaves the group. And then shortly after that, Nick leaves the group. And the beauty of the show is that the songs can be diegetic, in that they are performing them live, but also they have to do with Frankie’s emotional state. So when it cuts to “Let’s Hang On,” after having just said goodbye to two band members, Frankie is singing this song about wanting somebody to not leave. And there’s this beautiful climactic moment in the song where he’s going, “Baby, baby, baby, stay.” It’s this big, building moment where the chords are just rising and rising. And it hits these two big beats. And that’s the first time Frankie speaks as a narrator that I find so beautiful, because it’s this moment where he’s like: “I’m done being quiet. I need to let you guys know I’m in this moment of desperation.” 

Q • What do you think audience members will be surprised by with this production?

A • I mean, other than the obvious scale of The Muny? The term that we’ve been throwing around in the rehearsal room has been “memory play.” In the first act, Nick narrates, then Bob narrates, and then Nick narrates, then Frankie narrates — each of the Four Seasons gets their chance to speak. And the beautiful thing about this is that Maggie has made it so that each narrator is dominating the space when they’re narrating. And they’re kind of pulling the strings and pulling from their memory and saying, “This is how I remember this thing happening.” Maggie ties it all together with each narrator, and we see an older version of them. It sets this framing device of memory and recalling.

Q • What do you want people to take away from the show? 

A • I don’t want to be cheesy, but I want people to actually ask the question “Who loves you?” People can walk into a show like Jersey Boys and expect what they’ve heard it to be — all the hits and just a good time. And while that is inherently true, what people might not expect is how moving and gripping not only the music and the way it’s set is, but the text, the scenes in between the songs and the relationships between these characters. This whole show really does explore the idea of: At the end of the day, who loves you, and who is there for you? For Frankie, that answer has always been music. And yet every character has their own relationship with it. And every character, as they rise to fame and notoriety, their relationship with love can become distorted. 

This show, full of so many love songs, can remind people what their relationship is with the people they love. I would love people to think about what song they relate to. Why do they cry when they hear “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”? Was it their wedding song? Do they relate to “Let’s Hang On” when they just want somebody to stay? Or “Fallen Angel” when it’s somebody who’s left you, but you still love them? 

Q • How do you like to prepare before a performance?

A • The nerdy answer is I do a set of warmups that I discovered the first time I did Frankie that helped me kind of access that vocal register. But other than that, you nebulize, you hydrate. I try to stretch. Sometimes I get lazy and I don’t, and then I regret it. Another thing that really grounds me is I play on my Switch. And also I like to — especially with this show — connect with the other three guys before we go on and just have a moment.