Writer: Joe DiPietro
Director: Kathleen Marshall
A jukebox musical about Frank Sinatra could have been many things: a greatest hits parade, a glittering tribute act, a sequined nostalgia trap. Sinatra: The Musical is none of them. Writer Joe DiPietro and director Kathleen Marshall’s latest opus is something rarer: a show in which every song is made necessary by the narrative.
The risk was considerable; jukebox musicals live and die by whether their songs feel chosen or merely collected, whether the drama earns the music or longingly seeks it. DiPietro’s book trusts that a complicated man honestly drawn is more compelling than a sanctified one, and that trust is what makes every song land. The mid-1940s to early 1950s was Sinatra’s crucible: an affair with Ava Gardner, the collapse of his record deal, vocal haemorrhage, the Oscar campaign for From Here to Eternity that reopened doors. A man who falls entirely and claws his way back.
The first act’s finale makes the case most notably: I’m a Fool to Want You – Frank, Nancy and Ava in three-part harmony – becomes a wall of despair, three people being unmade by the same love from three different angles. When I’ve Got You Under My Skin arrives, the audience has earned it; they have watched a man for whom Gardner is exactly that: under his skin.
Joel Harper-Jackson brings not imitation but embodiment: the swagger, the grit, the charm, precise enough to stir and stun a room. Harper-Jackson makes Frank human before he makes him the icon. Ana Villafane’s Ava Gardner meets him as an equal, the power shifting between them with every scene; Phoebe Panaretos as Nancy Sinatra – abandoned wife, patient mother, the woman who saw it coming – anchors the production in a feminine sorrow unique to that era; Mia Savident, as Frank’s young daughter, wrings genuine anguish from a single telephone call.
The production never loses its wit alongside its weight. Come Fly With Me arrives early as the soundtrack to Frank’s first infidelity, its lyrics recast as seduction: ‘come fly with me’ as proposition, ‘once I get you up there’ leaving… little to the imagination. Jenna Russell’s Dolly Sinatra operates in the same spirit, her final address that half the audience wouldn’t have been conceived without Frank Sinatra, sending the house out beaming.
Sinatra: The Musical is no hagiography. Tina Sinatra’s involvement has not softened her father’s edges but encouraged their confrontation. The violence toward the press, the Mafia connections, the glamour and the wreckage share the stage without apology.
The second act slows at its midpoint, a cost the production absorbs without quite losing its momentum. Lesser-known numbers carry the narrative weight early: I’m Gonna Live Till I Die, perfectly placed in Sinatra’s comeback sequences, does more work than any ballad could, so that when New York, New York finally detonates, it arrives as something earned.
The live band, concealed behind a screen for much of the evening and revealed only at narratively appropriate moments, is unmasked entirely for the finale: Harper-Jackson, blue-suited and fedora donned for the first time, marooned against the band at his Columbia Records debut, his voice finding heights held deliberately in reserve until now. The Frank Sinatra the audience knew was coming has arrived.
That a show produced by Sinatra’s own daughter emerges as the most honest account of him – adultery, Mafia and all – is the final, unexpected triumph. Sinatra: The Musical is the real thing.
Booking until 10 April 2027
