@ Edinburgh Playhouse, until Sat 5 Mar 2016

If you’ve seen Clint Eastwood’s film of this flashy stage musical, put it out of your head immediately. The movie, which tried unsuccessfully to do Goodfellas with tunes is best avoided. On stage things are infinitely better.

It’s true that the backstory of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ rise to fame offers many of the usual suspects: nagging WAGS, scheming agents, exhausting tours and brotherly fallings out. What makes the story so winning is that the output of the ambitious boys from Jersey’s shore (and thereabouts) were like a 1950s Vegas lounge act yet, defying the odds, made it big in the revolutionary 60s. Says one: “it was the music but kept us out of the gutter.”

The conceit is that the boys might have become hoodlums or, worse, fully mobbed-up gangsters had their act not finally paid off with recordings and chart success. And the act? The songs, that relied heavily on doo-wop, were oddly dated, even in the 1960s, yet became a minor canon of singalong favourites. Along with the Beach Boys, the Four Seasons were the top American male singing group of the time. In the course of their career they sold 80 million records. That triumph was owed chiefly to a great choice of material and the extraordinary clarity and sureness of Valli’s falsetto (eat your heart out Sam Smith).

In the summer of 1962 the group’s Sherry was number one on the hit parade followed smartly by two others: Big Girls Don’t Cry and Walk Like a Man – big-hearted, good-time sounds. Guy songs. Others followed: the travelling salesman theme tune Working My Way Back to You and in the 1970s My Eyes Adored You and the shamelessly nostalgic December ’63 (Oh What a Night). And the great wedding reception anthem Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.

Matt Corner, as Valli hits all the right notes – the style, the swagger and the voice. That voice! This touring production of the international smash hit has plenty of the required zing, the close harmonies, sharp suits, a sure-fire storyline full of tears and laughter and direction that fairly whisks you along. And there’s those great songs, many familiar from covers by the likes of Boyzone and the Bay City Rollers – although some are maddeningly abbreviated. There is even comic relief in the unlikely form of a teenage Joe Pesci (Damian Buhagiar). “None of the band are saints,” we are reminded as the boys walk out and cope with drink and dames.

In hock, Frankie has to keep touring no matter what, to pay off accumulating debts and his family life goes down the pan. It really makes you want to cheer the little guy upfront. The book was co-authored by veteran Marshall Brickman so it’s funny and smart. The direction (Des McAnuff) is snappy and the look and feel of the production is a slick as Valli’s brilliantine.

If hen parties have Mamma Mia then guys on stag nights (if they went to musicals at all rather than got drunk and made fools of themselves) this would be the musical they’d go to.