“Sherry, Sherry baby, She-e-e-e-e-rry… Stay, ahhh, just a little bit longer…I-yi-yi-yi found me a girl (Candy girl)… Big girls don’t cry, they don’t cry… Walk like a man, Talk like a man, Walk like a man my s-o-n.”

It only takes a few bars of those great Four Season harmonies to transport us back to a time when love felt more innocent and life was filled with endless possibilities.

If you’re of the younger generation who didn’t grow up with those songs in your DNA, then you may have heard them on “The Sopranos” or in countless movies like “The Deer Hunter,” “Dirty Dancing,” and “Love Actually.”

Luckily, we can take a nostalgic trip down memory lane any time we want by heading over to The Palazzo where the wildly successful, internationally acclaimed, Tony award-winning musical “Jersey Boys” has been bringing audiences to their feet six nights a week since it opened on May 3, 2008, which just happened to be Frankie Valli’s 74th birthday.

Recently I had the chance to see…no…to experience the show and it was pure joy and ended two hours too soon. The entire cast was brilliant, but it was the four guys who portray The Four Seasons who had me doo-woping in my seat one minute and in need of a box of tissues the next.Afterwards, I went backstage and met Rick Faugno, who is the iconic Frankie Valli; Erich Bergen, who channels Bob Gaudio, the songwriting prodigy who played keyboards and wrote the music for all their hits; Erik Bates, who is the consummate loud-mouth hustler, lead-guitar playing Tommy DeVito, who started the group and then almost took it down; and Jeff Leibow who you can’t help but like as mild-mannered Nick Massi, the bass player with a genius for harmony who gave The Four Seasons their unique sound.

As the guys explained it, the idea for “Jersey Boys” took shape when Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio saw the musical “Mamma Mia,” a fictional story built around the ABBA songbook and said, “Hey, we have a nice catalog of music,” which is like saying that Las Vegas has a few hotels.

Valli and Gaudio thought the same formula would work for their own jukebox musical with a story written around their hits, but they didn’t know how to go about it. They met with writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice and once they started talking about their lives, Brickman and Elice quickly realized that the lives of four dropouts from New Jersey who were more likely to end up in Sing Sing Prison than in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was far more interesting than anything they could make up.

Still Valli and Gaudio were hesitant. They didn’t want their lives portrayed as comic book versions of themselves. Nor did they want the show to look like “Guys and Dolls” or “Goodfellas,” but rather something in between. They also knew that for the show to be realistic, they’d have to reveal things they’d swept under the carpet long ago.

Though Nick Massi passed away in 2000, to their credit, the three remaining guys gave Brickman and Elice the green light to tell the real story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.

And that’s the difference between “Mamma Mia” and “Jersey Boys.” “Jersey Boys” is not a musical in the sense that the songs don’t further the plot. Rather it is a deeply moving play written in the style of the VH1 documentary series “Behind the Music,” with a compelling storyline and songs set up like concert footage performed live by the actors.

Cleverly, the story is weaved together as The Four Seasons take turns narrating their point of view to the audience. As Tommy says at the beginning, “You ask four guys how it happened and you get four different versions.”

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