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When Harry Hill and Simon Cowell’s ‘X Factor’ musical ‘I Can’t Sing!’ crashed and burned at the start of last year, it was like something broke in musical theatre: since then, producers seem to have given up on putting new work into London’s biggest theatre, the 2,000-seat London Palladium.
But if no-one living can fill it, perhaps a dead guy can. ‘Sinatra: The Man & His Music’ is, erm… well it’s not a musical; maybe a concert experience (?) in which a full orchestra and a bunch of dancers accompany archive footage of Frank Sinatra, who would have been 100 this year.
If that sounds awful and tacky I can assure you it’s genuinely not. Plenty of money has been pumped into a show fully endorsed by the Sinatra family, and director David Gilmore and team have been given extensive access to their archives, with the recordings all extremely well chosen. There’s not much Vegas glitz, a lot more of the soulful New York loner: with the man himself blown up to enormous proportions on a series of moving screens, you really appreciate how thoughtful his performances were, and what melancholy depths Ol’ Blue Eyes found in his great numbers, from ‘Pennies from Heaven’ to the valedictory ‘My Way’. The songs are interspersed with snippets of the man talking about his life, and again these are well-judged, interesting nuggets that portray him as a reflective storyteller without tipping the show into hagiographic territory. It is the polar opposite of the ghastly Michael Jackson celebration ‘Thriller Live’, and all the better for it.
But let’s not get carried away. It is still basically paying up to £125 to spend two hours looking at some old telly footage. The orchestra under Richard John sounds absolutely splendid, but the dancing is frequently an irritant, with several extended instrumental sections coming across like everyone forgot whose name is up in lights. And above all it feels like a compromise: enjoyable, sure, but ultimately a stopgap in lieu of a musical. Still, it’s far classier than it had to be – fans of Frank’ll get a kick out of it, for sure.