Bringing Ol’ Blue Eyes back to life

May 2 2008 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

Philip Key takes a colourful musical journey through the life of Frank Sinatra

FRANK SINATRA made several comebacks throughout his career, but none matches his comeback appearance at the Liverpool Empire next week – 10 years almost to the day since his death.

Titled simply Sinatra, the show, using hi-tech equipment, brings Sinatra back on stage using a series of screens and a live 16-piece swing band.

It is a concept first tried out in New York’s Radio City Music Hall, and later refined for a run at the London Palladium, and the show arrives in Liverpool from Tuesday.

The man behind it is British theatre director David Leveaux, who has directed regularly on Broadway with shows ranging from Greek tragedy and Tom Stoppard to musicals.

Leveaux admits it was a new sort of project for him, intrigued initially about using technology and having an open book on which to devise a show.

“Above all, I was drawn to it because of Sinatra, a man whose career covered most of the 20th century and who I thought had something heroic about him.”

Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on December 12, 1915, of an immigrant Italian family. His was a difficult birth (he weighed 13½ lbs) and the forceps delivery left facial scars that remained with him the rest of his life.

Of Hoboken, his biographer Derek Jewell wrote: “To say it’s like Liverpool is probably to overpraise it – more like Liverpool’s neighbours, Birkenhead or Bootle. Hoboken is no place for weaklings.”

By the time of his death on May 14, 1998, aged 82, Sinatra was the most famous singer in the world.

The stage show is a musical and personal journey which is captured in the words of the man himself, and most importantly with some of his finest performances on film and video.

The Palladium show was a change from the original New York effort, which Leveaux describes as “quite a few talking heads”.

“When I was asked to put it on at the Palladium, the idea was to put something together that was more of a celebratory concert and so we have Sinatra as the only person who speaks all night and it was quite a different trip.”

His biographical chatter comes from audio-tapes, radio broadcasts and his monologues at concerts. “He was a brilliant anecdotist and when you start stringing those anecdotes together you get a picture of a life, a life that covered almost three-quarters of a century.”

The show features a series of floating screens onto which Sinatra’s singing performances are projected while a live 16-piece band on stage plays all the swinging arrangements. There is also a team, of dancers and singers to add more colour.

Leveaux took Sinatra footage from various periods in his life, from the early 1940s onwards, some on 35mm film, some on video from the TV age. The tech- nical bit comes in when they work- ed on the film footage for which they were able, in some instances, to take Sinatra’s image, below, and insert a different background.

“We did that for just some film; it was not really appropriate for the video and there are some fantastic fragments of film, with Sinatra as a young man, which have a flickering ghostly quality about them which we wanted to keep. We did not want to spruce up everything regardless.”

Even more importantly, they were able to remove the original backing sounds on the films so that the on-stage orchestra playing the same arrangements could provide the special live sounds.