A couple of years ago, on a drive through the picture book hills and lakes of Connemara, my pal (his car, his driving, his choice) played a compilation of Frank Sinatra’s hits on the music system. He sang along lustily, as I contemplated the contrast with the landscape and wondered about how long it would be before I could suggest a bit of Van Morrison, The Pogues, Val Doonican…
Because I’ve never really got 'The Chairman of the Board'. I see what others see, but it’s all too clean, too consciously produced, too overweening in its sheer Frankness for me to engage. Every song was Sinatra first and the music and lyrics a distant second - that his signature hit is the bombastic “My Way” didn’t exactly help. That said, I’ve always considered him a very fine actor - brilliant in The Man With The Golden Arm - and that gave me some solace that I wasn’t missing out through some deep seated prejudice, an early overexposure to the television tuxedoed persona when he was well past his best.
Nevertheless, I looked forward to the show (for show it is) in a very mixed matinee house, much younger than I expected, Sinatra The Musical now on a long West End run after a tryout in Birmingham (The Midlands, not Alabama) three years ago.
We open on some excellent video work from Akhila Krishnan (which is continued further in the biggest, heaviest programme I’ve ever seen, packed with fantastic photographs of Frank and co). It’s wartime and Frank is all four Beatles rolled into one, the girls screaming for our hero who was already keen not to be a younger version of Bing Crosby, but his own man, his own artist. His agent, George Evans (Lee Zarrett), is keen to get him into uniform, but only Hollywood style - enough to rebut the charges of draft dodging bubbling up - and does so, when he’s cast in Anchors Aweigh with Gene Kelly.
I was looking forward to Joe DiPietro’s book going on from there to explore Sinatra’s place in postwar American culture, knowing that he was, like Tony Bennett, a committed supporter of civil rights, but also linked to The Mafia, throwing a superb hissy fit when he saw Johnny Fontane sing at Connie’s wedding in The Godfather. With Frank Sinatra Enterprises and his daughter, Tina, listed as co-producers, that juicy stuff never goes beyond a little local colour en passant and forms a fig leaf defence to accusations of whitewashing a life that navigated 60 years at the top of the entertainment industry as one of its great survivors.
We soon find out, with a little inward sigh, where it’s actually going as family man Frank leaves his wife in New Jersey and lands in Hollywood to have his head turned instantly by Lana Turner and not long after by Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich - as one would, to be fair. That’s told through a very funny routine to “Come Fly With Me” - that’s “Fly” not, well, you know what it’s not, even though it is.
But the book then goes into rather hackneyed territory. Frank hits the booze, hits on Ava Gardner and hits the buffers as the record sales dry up and the casting agents stop calling. Ol’ Blue Eyes wasn’t much above 30, but he was too old for the teenage market just emerging and too indiscreet to be screwing around away from prying eyes. His public didn’t care for what they saw of the man behind the voice and the gossip columnists smelt blood.
In a long production, almost all of its runtime is dedicated to a wealthy man treating his wife and kids badly - but feeling guilty about it, natch - and concurrently trying to secure business deals. Like the recent Leonard Bernstein biopic, it concentrates on the least interesting, least influential aspects of an extraordinary life and makes it much more ordinary as a result. It’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s that it’s a major figure examined through the lens of Hello magazine, the glare of a shiny surface reflecting the light back before it can access morally dark corners or illuminate interesting artistic alleyways.
Not that most of the audience will care. Director/choreographer, Kathleen Marshall, keeps the hits coming, including crowdpleasers like “That’s Life” and “Fly Me To The Moon” all played with magnificent verve by Gareth Valentine’s big, brassy orchestra - don't miss their post-curtain jam. If the songs feel a little wedged into the narrative, that’s a price you pay in a jukebox musical.
Joel Harper-Jackson is too ripped to play the famously skeletal Frank, but he has a super voice which hints at Sinatra’s rather than impersonates what are, after all, the pretty unimpersonatable phrasings and stresses of the original. Ana Villafañe has the swagger and sexual confidence of Ava down to a tee and sings with plenty of West End belt, at times overshadowing her leading man, something Ava was doing herself at this time in their careers. Neither are exactly transgressively scary-sexy though, because that might frighten off the coach parties that will surely roll up, some of whom might not care for the somewhat gratuitous swears either.
Phoebe Panaretos carves out enough agency as Nancy to be more than just a wronged wife and Jenna Russell, shamelessly and hilariously, steals scene after scene as the other Mrs Sinatra, as close to a stereotypical Italian mama as you’ll find outside a Dolmio advert.
She also has some choice words about prejudice towards Italians in postwar America that stiffens Frank’s resolve when he needs it. So too does Billie Holliday, but Melissa Nettleford has a pitifully underwritten role which, somehow, still manages to be bigger than Oliver Adam-Reynolds’s as Nat King Cole. I get that the show isn’t about racism, but it seems almost worse to nod towards it so tokenistically, than it would be just to ignore it altogether,
Like much that is sanitised and simplified for a mass market, Sinatra The Musical flattens a complex life, scatters glitter liberally around it and sends its public away happy, toes tapping. It’s just dandy while you’re there, but the spectacle fades in the memory almost before you’ve worked out whether it’s a left or right turn you make towards The Strand.
And Sinatra is too big, too influential and too loved a figure for that to be his fate.
Sinatra The Musical at Aldwych Theatre
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