OL’ BLUE EYES, THE COMEBACK
It’s one of the great showbiz comeback stories: how a tough Italian-American kid saw Bing Crosby in 1935 and had a dream; rose in he 1940s to crazy fame, albums and films, married his Nancy with the laughing face. But as decades rolled on he erred, was dropped by both film and music giants after upsetting American moralities with his affair with Ava Gardner and being suspected of Mafia links after going to Cuba with a childhood friend turned Mob. . He dumps Nancy, marries Ava but is abandoned by her two years on. Near broke for a spell, Frankie fights his way back, wins an Oscar and becomes a legend once again.
Here’s a man who faced scorn for being Eye-talian in his youth, who messed up his marriage but adored his children, an emotional stormer who turned down work rather than sing numbers he didn’t “feel”. There’s a really sharp, sensitive play in there, unwritten, which haunted my imagination all through this big, blasting, powerhouse show by Joe DiPietro and Kathleen Marshall (who does the terrible 1940s-50s choreography brilliantly, bobbysoxers racing onstage at the start).
OK, they did it their way : a great 17-piece band and number after number meshed into the plot even when you are pining for more dialogue, more pauses, more nuance. Joel Harper-Jackson is a likeable star, not of course quite the Sinatra voice though he makes a good try to convey the later, sensitive deepening and seriousness which kept him at the top for my parents’ generation. Set against the immense witchcraft-star power of Ana Villafane’s Ava Phoebe Panaretos is a convincingly wifely Nancy, especially as she snaps that he’ll never be up there with Bing Crosby “if you keep going with dime-a-dozen women This too shall pass”. Singing, she’s an unsubtle old-fashioned belter.
Scenes are stolen a good few times by Frankie’s parents, especially `Jenna Russell as Dolly, and when she and Marty Maguire roar into their own “You make me feel so young” in the second half the first real cheer came from the big audience, especially the Americans around me. There’s a particularly skilled ensemble – hard to believe there are only 17 including Swings – who they drop in and out of roles from Nat King Cole and Lana Turner to Dietrich and Gene Kelly (teaching Sinatra to dance, though we never get to see Harper-Jackson doing it). Lee Zarrett is a lovely rueful presence as manager George Evans.
It moves fast, and ther are some funny sequences involving Hollywood bed-hopping and a few glorious lines, often from George. The brief “My Way” is touchingly staged, and so is “One for my Baby” in Sinatra’s hardes moments, with the star suddenly, properly, seeming to feel it. But too often it is, oddly, the sung numbers which stall the show’s momentum.
Never mind. It storms out with the compulsory Broadwayish standing ovation and a deafening “New York, New York”. So you leave feeling pretty good. And, in my case, after being so much reminded of the kind of my parents played and danced to in the 1950s, I enjoyed the appositely retro fact that the Aldwych has real brass stair-rods on the carpet on the way back out. For some, the show will be a five. For me,, not quite. But it’ll be a treat for many.
sinatramusical.com booking to February
rating three
theatreCat 