on the return of Ol’ Blue Eyes
Sinatra: the Man & His Music
London Palladium
Ol’ Blue Eyes is back and this time it seems we’re never going to get rid of him. Seventeen years since he shuffled off this mortal coil, 20 years since his last performance, 44 years since his first retirement, Frank Sinatra was back on stage at the Palladium, in voice, image and spirit if not in person.
In touching, tearful remarks during the curtain call, the doddering figure of 75-year-old Nancy Sinatra admitted that the show had been “sweet agony” for her. “It’s hard to watch sometimes,” Sinatra’s daughter told cast and crew, “but that’s just proof of what a great job you did.”
If you were cynical about it, you might find it hard to watch for very different reasons. The narrative was inevitably sentimental and hagiographic, and there was something discombobulating about the collision of two different eras of entertainment in a production that employs all the hi-tech multimedia dazzle of video projection and computer animation with the decidedly old school razzle of a dinnerjacketed orchestra and high-kicking jazz dancers. It was a form of sci-fi cheese, the Bladerunner version of Saturday night light entertainment. But it was, at least, genuinely eyeboggling, and, at best, powerfully effective.
If you are going to a Sinatra show, the one thing you really want is Sinatra himself. Here he was, lowered into the production on a succession of screens, in recalibrated old film and TV footage with direct close-up shots, so you could see the vulnerability in his wary eyes, the flashes of tension and joy in his face and the wobbling of his lower lip as he prepared to sing.
Sinatra’s voice was sometimes a bit thin in the mix, the vocal tracks recaptured from filmed performances lacking the luscious depth of the live musical backing. But the tone, phrasing, personality and emotion that make him a giant of 20th-century music was absolutely undeniable. You surely didn’t have to be a relative of the great man to find yourself welling up at his weary, dreamy, utterly bereft version of I Got You Under My Skin sung to huge ghostly images of his lost love Ava Gardner, while the stage turned into a tormented purple sunset and a silky orchestra swept through melancholic chords and sinuous rhythms.
Old Sinatra interviews, weaved into a voice-over narrative, were strung together with a rapid interplay of visual elements. Ever-shifting street scenes, historic photographs, dance routines and inventive stage lighting engaged and distracted the senses until the singer was unveiled on one dropped screen or another.
It struck me that we have slowly been educated to accept this kind of substitute presence as performance. Audiences at big modern pop shows watch the screens as much, if not more, than the actual musicians onstage. Theatre is more intimate and unforgiving, but it turns out the dead can get away with some things the living would never be allowed to do. During a sublime One For My Baby, screen Sinatra lit up a giant cigarette and puffed his way with careless élan through the outro. When was the last time you saw somebody smoking in a theatre?
‘His voice was a bit thin in the mix, but the emotion that made him a musical giant was undeniable’
Until Oct 10. Tickets: 0844 412 2704; sinatraonstage.com