Frankie Valli

FUNNYMAN Joe Piscopo will perform publicly in his Frank Sinatra get-up for the first time since "Saturday Night Live. " On Aug. 28, the Jersey-born entertainer's show, "That's Life," comes to the Circus Maximus theater at Caesars Atlantic City, along with singer Michael Longoria , who played Frankie Valli in "Jersey Boys" on Broadway. Piscopo, a multi-instrumentalist, will play drums, guitar, piano, sax, flute and also appear as Bruce Springsteen . As far as his Sinatra garb, Piscopo told us yesterday that he had to dig around the basement of his home in Hunterdon County, N.J., to find the bow-tie and pinkie ring he wore as Sinatra, or "The Old Man," as he calls him, from his "SNL" days.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER and wife Joan dined with Phillies slugger Chase Utley and wife Jen at La Collina (37 Ashland) in Belmont Hills after Sunday's game. The senator attends most Sunday home games. We're told Specter and Utley were gracious to fellow diners and said hello to those who approached them. Also dining there Sunday was 1340 WHAT-AM's JD , who was with his family. Out and about Frankie Valli celebrated his 75th birthday by performing at Atlantic City's Borgata.

The guy speed-walking out of the subway, tugging on his tongue with a paper towel as he crosses Seventh Avenue, is running late for work. It's Jarrod Spector, sneaking in vocal exercises. Three weeks ago, the singer-actor from Huntingdon Valley, Pa., took over the Frankie Valli role in the Broadway smash musical Jersey Boys after starring on the road in San Francisco and Chicago. "Anywhere else, people would look at me kind of strange," Spector, 27, says, settling into his dressing room at the August Wilson Theatre.

The night of Sunday, Nov. 6, 2005, was a big one on Broadway, the opening night for Jersey Boys, the musical biography of the '60s pop group the Four Seasons. About an hour and a half before the curtain was to go up, everyone gathered on stage at the August Wilson Theater in Manhattan to participate in one of Broadway's many superstitions. Called the gypsy robe, it dates to 1950, when Bill Bradley, a dancer for the Broadway production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, borrowed a robe from one of the "gypsies" - the ensemble cast members, not the leads - on opening night and danced through the backstage area, blessing everyone before the curtains went up. The show was a hit, and a superstitious tradition was born, one with very stringent rules and regulations.

EVERY TIME I turn on the news, there's another murder in Philadelphia. Born and raised here, it breaks my heart. An election is coming up, and everyone has a "solution. " They say there are no jobs. But you have to crawl before you walk. I graduated from college in 1972, and jobs were almost impossible to find. I worked for the minimum wage at Strawbridge's for two years. When they asked me to work on my days off, I was there. A great experience! Before leaving, the company offered me a position in management.

Back in the late 1980s, when the Pet Shop Boys flaunted their anti-rock inauthenticity, Neil Tennant once justified a lip-synched TV performance with the quip, "I quite like proving that we can't cut it live. " That was long before the graying Boys - singer Tennant is 47, and keyboard player Chris Lowe is 42 - brought out the new Release, in which the dance-pop duo employs warm guitar textures and subdued grooves more suitable for listening to on the sofa than under a disco ball.

A powerful tale of World War II tops this week's list of new movies on video. Saving Private Ryan . . (1998) (DreamWorks) 169 minutes. Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Matt Damon, Jeremy Davies, Vin Diesel, Adam Goldberg, Barry Pepper, Giovanni Ribisi, Dennis Farina, Ted Danson. Steven Spielberg's World War II masterpiece uses the conventions of the war movie to transcend them. The combat sequences are stunning, and the questions posed by the mission undertaken by Hanks and his squad are profound.

It has been a long wait for Frankie Valli fans, but the falsetto-voiced singer is preparing to get back into a recording studio. "I can't remember when my last album was - that's how long it has been," said Valli, who last night began a four-day engagement at the Tropicana. "To tell the truth, I just had no interest in the studio. I've been hearing what's out there, what's being played on the radio. "I'm just happy I'm not starting out in the music business today. I would never make it. The music, the values today, well, none of it is where I'm coming from.

It's the same old stuff this summer at the shore. You've got guys in or near their 60s (Frankie Valli, Little Richard) and 70s (comedian Cozy Morley) as headline acts. You have old rockers (the Beach Boys) and old rollers (the Righteous Brothers). You have aging babe magnets, (Tom Jones and Julio Iglesias) and fading pop icons (Linda Ronstadt and Liza Minnelli). They'll appear in a casino lounge or theater near you, and casino executives couldn't be happier. They want the tried-and-true acts that appeal to their loyal customers.