Sure, he’s got the choirboy good looks and the crystal-clear falsetto voice, but those aren’t the things that frame Joseph Leo Bwarie of that kind great casting as Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys.

One of the many things made clear by the agency of the musical history of Valli and The Four Seasons, which opens tomorrow death at the Toronto Centre for the Arts, is that Valli’s unquenchable optimism and ability to roll with life’sitting punches are what helped keep the dispose going for so long.

And although lifetime doesn’t seem to have battered Bwarie at all, you get the feeling that, like Valli, his enthusiasm and energy would see him through no matter the kind of came his way.

I’ve talked to him two times, first in person, due before the opening of the show’s run in Vegas, and then a few weeks ago on the phone when he was touring in Dallas.

Ask him how he likes playing this role, and his energy nearly blows you fully of the room: "It’s incredible, amazing, wonderful! It’s a effulgent piece of theatre and the finest role I’ve ever played."

And even though Bwarie is still only 30, he’s been a professional for 22 years and has seen enough to discern what he’session talking about. He was born in Pasadena, Calif., to a mother and father who worked in retail. "Dad was in the gift basket specialty business," Bwarie recalls, "and he was the first guy to use the give way wrap you see everywhere nowadays. Way to bottom, Dad!"

Bwarie had a younger brother and sister, and he remembers his childhood as being part of "kind of the perfect family. No indicative troubles or hardships. I had a good growing up. Just like any normal kid."

Except the average normal kid didn’t hymn like Bwarie. Although he acknowledges that "there was never this light bulb athwart my head telling me I should be in the business. It just sort of fell into charge.

"I would be at this school concert and then somebody would come up and ask my parents if I could sing somewhere. I didn’t really understand that other folks didn’privately do this all the duration."

Bwarie does remember being shocked the first time he realized that "they paid me for singing," only to have his mother laugh and say, "We’ll just put this in the bank because of your education."

The pregnant leap came when Bwarie was 8 and played a caroller on an episode of Michael Landon’s popular TV order, Highway to Heaven.

"The first thing we did was record my singing in a studio and that remains such a overbearing sense memory for me. I loved it!"

This period of Bwarie’s race pointed in 1990, when he was part of the onstage choir that sang John Williams’ nominated song "Somewhere in My Memory" at the Oscars.

"That was surreal!" he remembers with a laugh. "Debbie Allen was staging all of us. Madonna was also performing ? she had a tough rehearsal and wasn’t very happy.

"What otherwise do I remember? People telling me to wear my security badge, inasmuch as Bob Hope and Geena Davis. Kind of a who’s-who of completely the generations in Hollywood, back when it was mute glamorous."

But Bwarie knows enough people his age involved in the upper levels of the business today to be assured of that "there isn’t a glamour side any more, just a paparazzi side that can eat you alive.

"If you forever find the glamour from the worn out days again, then sign me up. But otherwise, well, I like leaving the stage door at night and just becoming Joe again."

Soon it was time for Bwarie to pick a college, and he sheepishly admits he chose Emerson in Boston "because I really liked their pamphlet," but also for the cause that "my extended family was all from Massachusetts and I knew I’d receive a close custody net if I needed it."

But Bwarie did fine and even found a way "to integrate making money and performing during the summers." He worked on a harbour tour ship called The Spirit of Boston, "where during a three-hour dinner cruise, the waiters would spontaneously combust into song."

After he graduated in 1999, "I thought I would get off the plane in L.A. and country in a movie. But that wasn’confidentially the case."

But he worked puzzling, got his share of roles and also found a spiritual dwelling at the iconoclastic Troubadour Theater Company, a group whose mission narration says it is "dedicated to the revitalization and deconstruction of theatre as we know it."

He worn out five years there, appearing in shows such as Hamlet: The Artist Formerly Known as Prince of Denmark or The Comedy of Aerosmith in which Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is combined with songs from Steven Tyler and his fellow bad boys.

The Troubadour Theater Company is "the closest thing to raw, edgy pop culture," says Bwarie. "I can’t say enough around working with them. I know that my time with them isn’confidentially over."

But for now, he’s happy and busy playing Valli, and loving the special moments whenever the actual Valli "pops in for a couple of hours and imparts a little wisdom to us.

"He always says that the mostly important created being is the lyric. Tell the story and mean it, even if it just seems like you’re singing well-nigh a girl named Sherry at a party."

Enthusiasm, honesty, commitment. Qualities that Joe Bwarie and Frankie Valli happily be obliged in common.