Wayne Newton talks about tour that stops at Parx
Not often does one get the chance to see Wayne Newton up close and personal without having to fly to Las Vegas.
But come Aug. 26, “Mr. Entertainment” himself will be standing on the Parx Xcite Center stage in Bensalem, singing his hits and regaling fans with tales from his truly remarkable career.
“I’m so looking forward to it because it’s been a while since we were on the road,” Newton said. “We do maybe three or four shows a year on the road normally, but this tour is quite exciting.”
Tickets for the 8 p.m. Parx show range from $35 to $75, and Newton will likely be joined onstage by an orchestra.
Of course, Newtown is ready to step in with any of the 13 instruments he’s learned to play.
“That came about by me doing six shows a night, six nights a week at the Fremont when I first went to Vegas in 1959, and that was a five-year contract that started out as two weeks,” Newton said. “I was the only singer as part of our show, and you know you can’t sing that much, so I kept developing instruments to give me vocal relief and ended up playing 13 instruments all total.”
This upcoming string of shows finds the legendary entertainer singing favorite songs and sharing personal career highlights through film clips, anecdotes and an audience Q&A.
“I’m telling stories, singing hits, playing instruments − whatever the people want to hear, that’s what they’re going to get,” promises the 81-year-old Virginia native who’s spent a half-century hailed as “Mr. Las Vegas.”
A preeminent nightclub singer, he’s a master at sizing up a crowd and figuring out on the fly how to tweak his set. But what’s his strategy for doing that?
“Well, what I do is start the show with three different types of songs. One uptempo, one ballad and one would be a standard. That kind of tells me by the reaction of the crowd what it is they want to hear,” Newton said. “I then turn around and tell the band what songs we’re doing. So, they’re prepared for whatever it is and whatever direction I go.”
There’s a different vibe playing an unfamiliar Midwest theater compared to a Vegas ballroom he’s headlined 1,000 times.
“I think the big difference is when you play the many showrooms of Las Vegas, everybody in that room is from a different place, and sometimes other countries, and so they don’t have the camaraderie of when you play a place (in Pennsylvania) where everybody is from that part of Pennsylvania. It’s a harder room to figure in Las Vegas, and that’s why we’re so looking forward to the show in (in Pennsylvania). At least we won’t have to deal with that.”
According to setlistfm.com, Newton last played Pa. in a 2016 show at Wind Creek Event Center in Bethlehem. Ask about his all-time favorite Pennsylvania memory, and he lights up with laughter, telling the story about a negative review a music critic gave him.
“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the gentlemen’s name because I can’t remember it. But there was a gentleman that came to the show there, and he was the reviewer for his paper, and he wrote an article about how much he disliked the show. Before he got to the end of the article, it said, ‘It must be obvious to you reading this review that I am not most of the people. The fact that I disliked the show, I might have been the only one there, because the gentleman got seven standing ovations and the place was packed.’ I thought to myself, now that is an honest reporter, so I called him, and I thanked him for his honesty about the show. And I said, ‘I understand the parts of it you dislike, but the fact that you added at the end that you were the exception to the rule. That could be one of the only bad reviews that I called to thank.”
Chatting by phone Aug. 8 from his home outside of Kalispell, Montana, where he stays when the Las Vegas heat gets too extreme, Newton cheerfully talked about a few of his biggest hits, such as the heart-tugging “Daddy, Don’t You Walk So Fast,” a 1972 million-seller.
“The biggest thing I get from people who love that song is that their parents had gone through a divorce, and they remember what it was like to say that to their father, or to see how difficult it was. In some instances, the father went back to the family for that very reason and it was one of the first songs that dealt with the subject of divorce, what it means for the children and the family.”
He’s proud of “Summer Wind,” pointing out it was a charting hit for him before vocal stars Bobby Vinton and Perry Como, and a year later Frank Sinatra, also achieved success with their versions.
Though 1963’s “Danke Schoen” remains Newton’s signature song, recorded when he was 21, he wasn’t the initially intended singer.
“The guy who started my real recording career was an incredible talent, Bobby Darin. Of course, he had ‘Mack The Knife’ and so many other songs, and I found out about a year after I had recorded ‘Danke Schoen’ that the song truly had been written for Bobby Darin to record, but he was so intent on making sure it got me a hit record that he gave me the song.
“With each of these songs of comes wonderful memories,” Newton said. “And we lost Bobby much too soon, he was only 37 years old, but I stayed with Capitol Records anyway, and today I have recorded 165 albums and over 200 singles.”
Newton had a museum for a while, displaying that huge collection of albums.
Newton keeps busy off-stage, too. This past June, he made a celebrity appearance at The World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
“That was very interesting for me because I’ve spent my life, from the time I was 15, in gaming casinos. Of course, you’re not supposed to be in one of those places until you’re 21. By the time I was 21. I had seen so many people that had ruined their life or their career by gambling. And so to this day I have never been to one of the tables nor have I ever been to one of the slot machines, and I have owned two casinos.”
Hosting that national poker event’s ceremonial Shuffle Up and Deal segment helped him raise money for military veterans, a cause near to the heart of Newton, who proudly serves as chair
man of the United Services Organizations (USO) Celebrity Circle, a post he took over in 2000 from Bob Hope when that comedy legend could no longer travel due to health reasons.
Prior to that, dating back to two Vietnam visits, Newton has entertained overseas troops amid every major military conflict in which the U.S. has been involved.
“And I’ll be doing that the rest of my life,” Newton said.
His TV and film credits are vast, including periodic roles on “Bonanza” and “Ally McBeal,” and spots in “Vegas Vacation” and the James Bond film “License to Kill.”
Who can forget his prime “Roseanne” appearance where he played himself, dealing patiently with the sitcom’s titular character heckling what she mistakenly believed was a Newton impressionist?
“That truly was a ball,” Newton said. “When I do television or a movie where I play Wayne Newton, it’s almost like Wayne Newton is a third party. Because if I play a character, I can say anything they want me to say, even vulgarity is not a problem. But when you (play) yourself, you might have to say, ‘Wayne Newton wouldn’t do that.’ So when I did her show, part of the script called for me to get her thrown out of the lounge, and I said, ‘Wayne Newton wouldn’t do that.’ And they said, ‘OK, what would Wayne Newton do?’”
Newton explains what he does in those rare instances of an unruly guest: “Ordinarily I handle it by talking to them and stop them from being boisterous.” Though for extreme cases he has a trick, where he meets with security guards ahead of time and tells them a story that if they hear him repeat to the audience during the show, that’s their cue to remove the misbehaving individual.
He’s performed more than 25,000 Vegas shows and seen just about everything.
“We have had people die during the show. Oh yeah. And we have had people have seizures during the show,” Newton said. “And so the lighting crew knows when I’m moving away from a person maybe having a seizure that is to draw the attention of the audience to the other side of the stage and let the medical people in and take care of what they have to take care of. Now in the instance of the person dying in the show, I moved away from that on stage and started a different song, and unfortunately, it was a quiet song, so the people came in to remove the gentleman from the booth, who was there with his daughter, supposedly. So, she stood up and yelled so everybody could hear it, ‘Don’t you move him. He has lived his whole life to come and see Wayne Newton, and he’s going to stay for the whole show!’ So, I let him stay for the whole show.
“In those places, if it could happen at a show, it will, so you have to be pretty much prepared for whatever is going to happen.”
Scott Tady is entertainment editor at The Times and easy to reach at stady@gannett.com.