TWO SHOWS – 1:00 and 7:15 pm | Live lecture with film clips
Will Friedwald, popular music and jazz expert and author of the book Sinatra! The Song Is You, will present a video clip show detailing the life and music of 20th century icon Frank Sinatra. Friedwald was seen at the Rosendale last year with a show of Louis Armstrong singing duets, and earlier this year celebrating the centennial of singer-musician Nat “King” Cole.
“Deconstructing Sinatra” follows the life and career of the skinny kid from Hoboken with highlights from television appearances, clips from his best movies, and anecdotes of his life story along the way. Frank Sinatra became a stylist of the best of popular music of the 20th century through his enormous talent and the force of his own personality. Coming of age during the Second World War Sinatra was responsible for many of the hits many of that era, including “All or Nothing at All,” “I’ll Never Smile Again,” and “You and the Night and the Music,” and “The Song Is You,” which figures in the title of Will Friedwald’s book about the singer.
In the 1950s Sinatra came into his own as an actor, winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1954 for his role as Maggio in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. A great night club performer, he and his buddies Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Joey Bishop formed a comedy and singing group known casually as “The Rat Pack,” which was a fixture in the biggest Las Vegas clubs for a decade. He formed his own record company and also was featured in a number of TV specials called “A Man and His Music.”
Sinatra was a premier popular and jazz artist of his day, with a vocal instrument and a sense of timing equally effective with love ballads as with the ironic lyrics of songwriters like Lorenz Hart and Johnny Mercer. At the start of his career his silken voice and stage personality had unprecedented appeal to bobbysoxers, the teenaged girls who filled theaters to swoon at the sound of his voice. Twenty years later he had won over the older set as well, and become established in movies as well as popular music.
A consummate entertainer, Frank Sinatra’s life and personality dominated the second half of the 20th century through many movies and a his own television show. “Deconstructing Sinatra” captures both his singing style, his “swinging” style, and the man himself.