He was thinking of studying architecture when “Silhouettes” launched him as a songwriter and record producer. He was frequently cast as Sandra Dee’s and Carol Lynley’s boy friend in ads, and soon was greatly in demand. It was easier earning a livelihood as a male model. Returning to the United States after working as an entertainer and painter in Europe, Bob began writing songs.
He recalls decking out the entire area with crepe paper and flowers as if it were King Arthurs’s court. Bob had much room in which to indulge his feeling for the theatrical. Peggy Ann Garner was vis-à-vis in two songs, which he remembers as “The Good Ship Lollipop” and “Shuffle Off To Buffalo.” Stanley and Mabel Crewe lived in the basement apartment of a building with Bob’s younger brothers, Dan & Tommy. He was born in Newark and at eight was the singing and dancing star of a program presented at the defunct Mosque Theatre by the pupils of the Lippel School of the Dance. Bob Crewe on the rooftops at his hometown.īob has had no musical training, other than piano lessons for a short period of his boyhood in Belleville, N.J.
DeVito generally complained about only one thing in the script: a crack about the cleanliness of his underwear.Bob Crewe is a strappingly handsome, freckle-faced, reddish-blond Irishman of a bachelor in his early thirties-he says “ early” and he looks it–who bluntly calls his record production company Genius, Inc. If the musical massaged the truth a bit, Mr. (Clint Eastwood directed a film version in 2014.) The show won four Tony Awards, including best musical and best featured actor (Mr. “Jersey Boys” opened on Broadway in November 2005 and ran until January 2017, one of the longest runs in Broadway history. Information on his survivors was not immediately available. “They might have asked me to play a private party or something, but they paid me for it. “Jersey Boys” implies that he was somehow connected to organized crime, but that was an exaggeration, he said, done for the sake of the story. He left school after eighth grade and started playing in local establishments for modest amounts, getting into scrapes with the law from time to time. The large DeVito family shared a flat with an uncle during the Depression, a difficult time. “Now that I’ve seen you doing it,” he recalled his brother saying, “every time I come home and I don’t see you practicing, that’s a beating.” There’s a lot of things I’d never do today that I did back then as a kid.” “When you first see yourself being played, you look at the actor, who is Christian Hoff, and say: ‘Do I look like that? Did I talk like that? Was I really a bad guy?’” he told Goldmine. But he was comfortable with the show, which he described as “about 85 percent true to life.” Seeing a version of himself portrayed in “Jersey Boys” was startling, he said. DeVito also had some success as a record producer and recorded an album of Italian folk songs. DeVito out and getting him bit parts in movies, including “Casino” (1995), also directed by Mr. Pesci broke through, he repaid the favor, helping Mr. DeVito for a time before he was famous, and once Mr. The actor Joe Pesci, a friend for many years (whose character in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” is named for Mr. He quickly burned through whatever money he had from the group’s heyday and took jobs working in casinos and cleaning houses to get by. He formed a band called the Variety Trio with one of his brothers and Nick Massi, who would become the fourth member of the Four Seasons when that group coalesced in about 1960. DeVito was, in his own words, “a hell-raiser” as a youth, but he found a purpose with music. Growing up in difficult circumstances in his native New Jersey, Mr. DeVito had moved to Las Vegas decades ago after leaving the Four Seasons in 1970. Valli said the cause was the novel coronavirus.
He was 92.įrankie Valli and Bob Gaudio, the two surviving original members of the group, announced his death. Tommy DeVito, an original member of the Four Seasons, the close-harmony quartet that rocketed to fame in the early 1960s with “Sherry” and other hits and earned new generations of fans when the Broadway musical “Jersey Boys” told a semi-factual version of the group’s story, died on Monday in Henderson, Nev.
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.