Sinatra The Musical

Sinatra The Musical follows a singer from a working-class childhood to the top of American entertainment, and then through the harder second act that fame usually keeps offstage. The standards are performed live, and the story is told through them rather than around them.

The show tracks the career — the early bands, the screaming crowds, the collapse, the comeback — alongside the private life that kept complicating it: the marriages, the affair with Ava Gardner, the children who saw a good deal less of him than the public did. It is a portrait rather than a tribute, interested in ambition, self-invention and what both of them cost.

Joe DiPietro wrote the book, and the piece had its first production in 2023 before being developed further for a later staging. It uses the standards associated with Sinatra as dramatic material, so the numbers arrive as scenes rather than as a concert set list.

Expect a big band sound, a large company and choreography built on the period. The show is at its strongest when the swagger cracks: the songs the audience knows best turn up at the moments when the man singing them is least in control, which gives very familiar material an unfamiliar edge. The staging moves quickly between nightclub, recording studio and hotel room.

It suits audiences who know the recordings and want the life behind them. It works best live, where an orchestra playing those arrangements in the same room is a large part of the reason to go.