New show

The life story of Frank Sinatra will be recreated through music and theatre in a special new show for the Arundel Festival.

Sinatra – The Reckoning will run from August 25-29 at 7pm at The Norfolk Arms Hotel, Arundel, featuring Paul Easom, Paul Giddings, Jonathan Oliver and Emily Swain, with music from The Phoenix Big Band plus the Lush Strings – plus a special appearance from Frank Cognoscenti as Frank. Tickets are on https://bighouse.band/sinatra

The show comes from Mike Carey, his sixth about a musician. The previous ones have included Count Basie, Burt Bacharach and Glenn Miller.

“I think this one is possibly the most ambitious,” Mike says. “Frank's life was so full on, and to distil that into two hours of music and theatre has been quite a challenge. We've got the big band and a Frank Sinatra singer and we have got a cast of four.”

Mike's starting point for the research were the biographies, especially the James Kaplan one, considered by many the definitive biography.

“I think we've all got ideas about his life story and little snippets of him and the notion that he was associated with the mafia and that he was a womaniser. Both of those things were undoubtedly true, but he also had a lot of good qualities.

“He was a first-generation Italian immigrant at a time when anti-immigration feeling was running very high and when the Italians were detested. His story has got a lot of parallels to America now. Even though America developed through immigration, it has got to the point where they are saying ‘We have got enough people’ and ‘Let's shut down’ and suddenly immigrants are getting the blame for all sorts of things.

“But Sinatra provided an example to the Italian-American community of how an immigrant can succeed. He was respected and admired by the Italians because he gave them hope. And he was also really big on anti-racism and on anti-Semitism. There was still segregation and there was still a lot of racial unease but he stood up against segregation. He wanted the black musicians to be staying in the same hotels.

“You could just think of him as a womanising gangster but he had so much more than that, and I hope that comes out in the play. It's a play for four people and then we've got the music around it. We've got around 25 numbers, and choosing the songs was also quite a challenge. He recorded thousands of thousands of songs so it's picking out the ones that I like and also the ones that are universally popular that you have to do.”

The premise for the piece is that Frank has just died but doesn't realise it yet: “He wakes up and thinks he has had a hell of a bender but the fact is he has just died. And a guy called Peter comes up to him. He is in purgatory basically, and Peter gets him to talk through his life story so that he can examine it and so that we can weigh it up... even though Frank doesn't realise what is happening.”

Advisory: be aware the production references adult themes and includes some unsavoury language.