Jersey Boys
5th Avenue Theatre
Through Jan 12.

Jersey Boys is a buffed and shiny thing, an entertainment machine greased with pomade whose engine hums in four-part harmony. Every component of this jukebox musical about the Four Seasons—from the mechanized set changes to the 34 musical numbers—is engineered to make time disappear.

It begins with some poor Italian toughs, including the fresh-faced Frankie Valli (Christopher Kale Jones), who split their time between burglary and singing under streetlamps. They're romantic artist-thugs, blithely drifting in and out of jail and breaking into churches just to accompany themselves on the organ and teach young Valli to hit the high choirboy notes. We barely notice we're doing the formulaic walk around the jukebox-musical Stations of the Cross: the struggle, the rise, the plateau, the fall. (It's a soft fall. Most of the Four Seasons are still alive and some are still working in the music business. Plus they're famous—in part—for their mob connections. Nobody wants to mess with that.)

Jersey Boys is predictable, but relentlessly entertaining. The four boys are dynamic types—the tough guy, the fresh-faced heartthrob, the cerebral musician (Bob Gaudio, who wrote the summer hit "Short Shorts" when he was 15 years old), and the guy who's just tagging along. The performances are slick and seamless, but nobody would notice if they weren't—the street-corner pop songs drive this roadster: "Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry," "Walk Like a Man," and 31 others. Valli's space-age falsetto fills the theater, the backup boys keep the beat, and every boomer head in the theater nods and smiles. The audience is complimented on its just-folks good taste.

"We weren't a social movement like the Beatles," one of the Seasons explains. "Our fans didn't put flowers in their hair and try to levitate the Pentagon. Our people were the guys who were shipped overseas, and their sweethearts. They were the factory workers, the truck drivers. The kids pumping gas, flipping burgers. The pretty girl with circles under her eyes behind the counter at the diner. They're the ones who really got us, who pushed us over the top."

Jersey Boys isn't cheap (you'll pay $30 to $90 for the pleasure). Today's gas pumpers and burger flippers can do the musical one better—drive out to the bluff, put the Four Seasons in the car stereo, and neck.

The Neverending Story
Seattle Children's Theatre
Through Jan 27.

One of the actors in The Neverending Story suggested eating a pot cookie before seeing the show—and who are we to contradict an artist's request? Seattle Children's Theatre has always been a pleasant haven for small children and stoned adults, with its sparkly star-patterned carpeting and abundant water fountains. The not-stoned adults at the Children's Theatre always seem even more tightly wound than their offspring, shouting in high, panicked voices: "Kendra! Come here! Don't tease Mommy!" Or: "Oh my God, where's my credit card?!" Or: "DON'T PRETEND TO JUMP OFF THAT!"

Anyway—The Neverending Story is an adaptation of a children's novel written in the late 1970s by a German named Michael Ende. (In 1945, at 16 years old, Ende was drafted into the German army, but he threw away his rifle and deserted, by some accounts joining an anti-Nazi underground movement. Take that, Günter Grass.)

Seattle actor Gabriel Baron plays a dreamy, nerdy boy with a recently deceased mother. One morning, he hides from bullies in a bookshop, where the gruff proprietor sort of gives him (and sort of lets him steal) the perfect book—a book about a fantasy world our dreamy nerd eventually falls into, where he finds his courage and becomes its hero.

The action is chopped into appropriately short episodes with monsters, trolls, people who are born old and grow young, a talking horse, and a giant grumpy turtle. The puppets, designed by Douglas N. Paasch, are simple and great, and the actors are among Seattle's finest: Baron (Stranger Genius Award winner), Hans Altwies, Sarah Hartlett, Michael Place (of Washington Ensemble Theatre), Tim Hyland (often of Strawberry Theatre Workshop), and so on.

The story is an allegory about depression—a great Nothing is negating the fantasyland, its Childlike Empress has a mysterious wasting disease, one character dies in the Swamps of Sadness because he can't cheer up, and the Luck Dragon (Altwies) saves people by being endlessly relaxed and optimistic.

High-strung grown-ups take note.