When Frank Sinatra died in 1998, Gore Vidal opined that the nation had lost its romance.
It lost more, of course. That voice. Those eyes. The style. The machismo. The attitude. The confidence. The rebellion. The sex appeal. The contradiction of a man who would slug a gossip columnist for asking about his known mafia connections, then walk on stage and sing “I Wish I Were in Love Again.”
All of it played a part in creating that blue-eyed cool that keeps Sinatra culturally relevant seven years after the end of a 50-year show-biz career in which the sheer originality of his phrasing made him one of the world’s great vocalists.
It is the mystique more than anything the cast of “My Way” will try to capture Thursday when they open their musical tribute to Sinatra at the Garner Galleria Theatre in the Denver Performing Arts Complex.
“When you delve into what is cool about any person, it’s never just one thing. It’s all of those things that somehow get balled up into one person and make this great package,” said actor John Fredo, who looks strikingly Sinatraesque, but makes no attempt to impersonate him in “My Way.” “I think he just went where he wanted to go, and once he realized that everybody was digging it, he jumped on that wagon and rode it.”
While any discussion of “Sinatra Cool” must start with “that voice,” the secret ingredient is romance – the kind that made it OK for any blue-collar tough guy in America to sing a ballad to his girl. He was the rogue rose who made it fine for bad boys to be sentimental.
“In ‘Mr. Saturday Night,’ Billy Crystal has this great moment when he realizes, ‘I was the guy every girl wanted to make love to, and every guy wanted to be.’ That’s essentially what we’re talking about here,” said Fredo. “If you’ve got somebody who can be romantic and idealistic while not taking crap from anybody – what a combination! That is the American hybrid.”
When Sinatra sings that he did it his way, he means it.
“What people respected most was that Frank never pulled any punches,” added Danny Wein. He’s not in “My Way,” but is Denver’s best-known Sinatra crooner. He performs Thursdays at the JW Marriott in Cherry Creek. “He always used to say, ‘I am here to entertain these fans, and after I’m through, that’s it. I’m going to do whatever I want to do.”‘
The cast of “My Way” was asked to each tackle one piece of the Sinatra mystique.
The voice: Fran Prisco had an epiphany when he first heard an early Sinatra recording of “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” “In that moment,” he said, “I got it … I got why they called him ‘The Voice.’ I got why the girls went crazy for him. I got why people fainted in front of him. You just hear that voice and you say, ‘I get it.”‘ Castmate Laura Ryan said the voice trumps that chiseled face. “You just have to hear it, and that’s enough,” she said. “There are so few performers where that is the case. With a lot of people, you have to see the face to understand the attraction.”
The attitude: “He had something everybody wants, male or female, which is complete personal freedom in all things,” said Shannan Steele. “How he sang his music, and how he lived his life without any rules was completely freeing. Male or female, young or old, 1950s or 2005 – it doesn’t matter. We all want that, or more of it.”
Added co-creator and director David Grapes: “Everybody deep down wishes we could go back to that world where we could say what we wanted to say, and do what we wanted to do. Frank just didn’t care. The reason there haven’t been any tell-all books about him since he died is because there was nothing left to expose. He lived his life in the open, which is something people admire.”
The attraction: “The sex appeal and confidence he had through the years is very appealing,” said Melinda Wilson. Added Ryan: “Women always are attracted to that kind of man. That magnetism and that bit of naughtiness are extraordinarily attractive … no matter how much of a (expletive) he may have been, the appeal is undeniable.”
The generational pull: Many fans were introduced to Sinatra through their parents. Prisco’s father has been crazy about Sinatra his whole life, “and so I have been listening to him my whole life,” he said. Klint J. Rudolph sang two Sinatra songs at his grandfather’s funeral.
“Elvis didn’t really live long enough to sing across every generation,” said Grapes, “but Sinatra became a hit in World War II and was still singing up until the 1980s. If you saw him in concert he would have all those young girls screaming right next to these middle-aged Italians. He’s got the dockworker and the steelworker. We haven’t had many iconic musical figures who cross over that way. Believe me, there are no 50-year-old Italian steelworkers listening to Michael Jackson.”
People are still listening to Sinatra. Last week, his “Classic Sinatra” disc ranked 123rd in Denver among all record sales by amazon.com. That’s out of hundreds of thousands of choices.
The danger: Sinatra downplayed his ties to organized crime, but people nevertheless found his connections to gangers like Lucky Luciano and Sam Giancana attractive. “Somehow, despite all the things he did while living his life, he still garnered respect, even from those who hated him,” Rudolph said. “That’s character.”
The music: Sinatra remains popular with youngsters today, Wein said, because yesterday, he was smart enough to record the standards of the day. It didn’t matter whether he sang ballads, swing tunes or show tunes. Tastes change, but Sinatra always reinvented himself and came surging back. “That’s because he always sang songs that really meant something,” Wein said. “And a song that means something will always mean something.”
That’s cool.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“My Way”
SINATRA TRIBUTE|Denver Center Attractions |Created by David Grapes and Todd Olson|Directed by David Grapes|Starring Laura Ryan, Shannan Steele, John Fredo and Fran Prisco|Garner Galleria Theatre at the Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets|OPEN-ENDED|Opens Thursday, then 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays|$32-$38|303-893-4100, 866-464-2626 or www.denvercenter.org (800-641-1222 outside Denver)
The “My Way” cast each was asked to choose one Frank Sinatra song that reveals something quintessential about Ol’ Blue Eyes:
Klint J. Rudolph, “One for My Baby” (“This torch that I found, it’s gotta be drowned, or it soon might explode”): “That it is the most heart-wrenching breakup song ever, and he never once actually talks about it. He never mentions her, and he never says he’s heartbroken. And yet you know exactly what he’s talking about. It has this incredible sense of maturity to it.”
Melinda Wilson, “L.A. is My Lady” (“You name it, I’ve been there and back, looking for someone who I’d be faithful to”): “I share personally with that because I lived in L.A. for too many years. That song holds a lot of emotion, excitement and distress for me, and a lot of what Sinatra had was wrapped up in that song.”
Fran Prisco, “Drinkin’ Again” (“Sure, I can borrow a smoke, maybe tell some joker a bad joke. But nobody laughs – they don’t laugh at a broken heart.): “There’s just something about sitting at the bar, looking at the people, having a drink and singing a song. When I am singing that song, there is something about it that has the potential for it to come across completely different every night.”
Laura Ryan, “Moonlight Serenade” (“I stand at your gate and I sing you a song in the moonlight”): “It gets me deeply every time it even starts, and that’s completely tied with my late father, who fought in World War II. We played Frank at my father’s funeral, because his music was that much a part of him. It’s such a powerful and romantic song, but it would not have the same meaning for me if anyone else were singing it.”
John Fredo, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (“I would sacrifice anything come what might for the sake of having you near”): “It’s got so many variances. It has humanity, it has humility and it has this raging hormone to it, all at the same time. ‘I am telling you that I’ve got you under my skin.’ What am I supposed to do with that? And it just escalates from there.”
Shannan Steele, “Something Stupid” (“I practice every day to find some clever lines to say to make the meaning come through): It’s so much about setting up the game of man-woman, and knowing there are risks involved, and you may lose the game, but in the end you might be completely vulnerable and say something stupid like ‘I love you.”‘
– John Moore
