Bill Zeffiros Birthday Tribute to Frank Sinatra

December 23, 2012

Urban Stages  –  December 12

Just a few blocks away, rock-and-roll royalty of the past 50 years were blasting their 12‑12‑12 concert, raising millions for Hurricane Sandy victims. While at Urban Stages, this quieter evening’s amiable host, Bill Boggs, was suggesting that if Frank were in the room he’d say something like, “Let’s get the booze, let’s get the broads and let’s get the hell out of here and go to Madison Square Garden.” Those of us in the capacity audience would not have agreed. We stayed in place and got to hear thirteen accomplished cabaret singers—all but two of them female, and most accompanied by the show’s energetic producer, Bill Zeffiro, on piano—sing a song apiece in honor of the Chairman of the Board, who would have turned 97 that day.

With a couple of exceptions, the numbers came chronologically in Sinatra’s career, and while all were associated with him in some way, many of the songs were also staples of the singers’ current or recent shows. From Frank’s 1500 recorded songs, the evening’s selections might have been hard to pick, but they were largely apt and well delivered.

Shaynee Rainbolt kicked things off in fine style with a sprightly “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” which had been written by George Bassman and Ned Washington in 1932, but remained ongoing as Tommy Dorsey’s theme song. Hence, it made an appropriate start to this career tribute to Dorsey band singer Sinatra. Marissa Mulder furthered the 1940s songbook portion of the show with “I Thought About You” (Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Mercer) from her Van Heusen tribute show.

Sinatra’s 1950s heyday set was well represented by Sigali Hamberger’s soulful rendition of “I’m a Fool to Want You” (Jack Wolf, Joel Herron, Frank Sinatra) from her Ava Gardner tribute show. Terese Genecco and Karen Oberlin nicely offered back-to-back early 1950s Nelson Riddle arrangements: Genecco with “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (Cole Porter, from the movie Born to Dance) and Oberlin with “My One and Only Love” (Guy Wood, Robert Mellin). Stacy Sullivan’s “He’s a Tramp” (Peggy Lee, Sonny Burke, from the 1955 movie The Lady and the Tramp), from her Peggy Lee tribute show, deserved inclusion because, according to Sullivan, Lee was thinking of Frank when she wrote and sang it.

Other highlights included Mary Foster Conklin’s evocative “How Insensitive” (Antonio Carlos Jobim, Norman Gimbel) from Sinatra’s mid-1960s period, and Ronny Whyte’s accompanying himself on the flashback standard “I Can’t Get Started” (Vernon Duke, Ira Gershwin, from the musical Ziegfeld Follies of 1936). After a fascinating video clip of Boggs interviewing Sinatra on a local New York station in 1975, which was both the singer’s first and longest talk show appearance, the evening ended as it should have, with the company singing eight bars of special Sinatra-tribute lyrics to “My Way” (Jacques Revaux, Claude François, Paul Anka).

 

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About the Author

Robert Windeler is the author of 18 books, including biographies of Mary Pickford, Julie Andrews, Shirley Temple, and Burt Lancaster. As a West Coast correspondent for The New York Times and Time magazine, he covered movies, television and music, and he was an arts and entertainment critic for National Public Radio. He has contributed to a variety of other publications, including TV Guide, Architectural Digest, The Sondheim Review, and People, for which he wrote 35 cover stories. He is a graduate of Duke University in English literature and holds a masters in journalism from Columbia, where he studied critical writing with Judith Crist. He has been a theatre critic for Back Stage since 1999, writes reviews for BistroAwards.com, and is a member of The Players and the American Theatre Critics Association.