“Come fly with me,” a young Frank Sinatra sings early in “Sinatra: The Musical.” That’s exactly what you expect from a show devoted to the crooner, who delivers this beloved standard while whisking Lana Turner into bed.
And yet it’s a surprise that the production containing this and countless other signature hits should seem so earthbound, especially with Broadway regulars like the director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall and the book writer Joe DiPietro at the helm. (They have five Tony Awards between them.)
Originally staged three summers ago in Birmingham, England, the musical has changed its leading man en route to opening this week at the Aldwych Theater in London. But for all the unarguable style that the English performer Joel Harper-Jackson brings to “Ol’ Blue Eyes,” there’s no getting around the plodding, pro forma quality of the show itself.
Time and again, we see Sinatra in one marital quandary or another, or scrambling to maintain his perch in a fickle showbiz world. But you keep waiting for the adrenaline rush that will lift an audience out of their seats. I felt that excitement only after the curtain call, when the musical supervisor Gareth Valentine’s expert 17-piece orchestra let rip and the Big Band sound sent playgoers out on a brassy, spirited high. (Additional credit is due Larry Blank’s zingy orchestrations, arranged by Valentine and Ian Eisendrath.)
For the most part, this bio-musical takes a paint-by-numbers approach to what feels like a Wikipedia entry with tunes — and even then only up to a point.
The story takes us to Sinatra winning the 1954 Academy Award for “From Here to Eternity” — a role for which, we are reminded, he wasn’t the first choice — before making what is breathlessly described as “the greatest comeback in recording history,” at which point the show comes to an arbitrary end.
And whereas “Sinatra: The Man and His Music,” the 2015 West End show cut from similar cloth, managed to reference his headline-making relationship with Mia Farrow, that third marriage goes unreported in this case in favor of a desultory account of a hard-drinking womanizer who happened to have a fantastic voice.
The vocals may be enough for audiences who arrive in the worshipful mode that Sinatra generated among his devoted bobby-soxers: News footage near the start recalls the hysteria that accompanied the singer in his prime. And so it is that the anticipated numbers arrive pretty much on cue. “My Way” finds Harper-Jackson’s sinuous Sinatra planted center stage to open the second act, just as “Theme From New York New York” is saved for a climactic showstopper — not to mention an acknowledgment of what presumably is this show’s preferred destination.
As it is, I’m not sure about this musical’s onward prospects. London, after all, is where “Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story” ran for over 12 years only to last nine months on Broadway; more recently, “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” ran far longer in London — at the same theater where “Sinatra” now is — than in New York.
Wary perhaps of seeming to sanitize its source, DiPietro’s book makes pretty heavy going of Sinatra’s infidelities. “I can’t be the woman you run back to,” a weary Nancy Sinatra — the singer’s first wife — remarks, and Phoebe Panaretos, the Australian actress who plays the role, might as well have “long-suffering” written across her forehead. On the other hand, Sinatra’s legendary press agent George Evans (Lee Zarrett) has some marital advice: “If you love each other, you get through it.”
Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland and Billie Holiday spin briefly in and out of view, as does Sinatra’s second wife, Ava Gardner (a gleaming-eyed Ana Villafañe), who gets serenaded with “Witchcraft” — surely enough to make anyone go weak at the knees. (It helps that Harper-Jackson is notably more muscled than the actual Sinatra, who had a skinnier frame.)
Sinatra’s mafia dealings are paid lip service when this quick-tempered man prone to fisticuffs travels to Cuba, and not for the cigars: The singer was part of a gathering of Mafiosi in Havana in 1947. Peter McKintosh’s sliding sets, rather gloomily lit by Bruno Poet, rarely settle anyplace for long, though a detour to Hawaii does allow for one of several shoehorned-in dance routines.
Throughout, barely one event has happened before we’re on the next, the script pausing now and again to check in with Sinatra’s sweary Italian-born mother, Dolly, who knows her way around a pasta sauce. That role is played in a bit of luxury casting by one of Britain’s leading Sondheim interpreters, Jenna Russell, who must feel here as if she’s on vacation, given the slightness of the role.
In the end, of course, our hero is forgiven his lapses, and the legacy is maintained. “Go out and do some amazing things,” Nancy urges Sinatra with remarkable generosity. And before long, he does exactly that — his way — leaving any fuller understanding of his vibrant and volatile life unexplored.
Sinatra: The Musical
Through April 10 at the Aldwych Theater in London; nederlander.co.uk.
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