Frank Sinatra Favorite Covers of Musical Theatre and Movie Musical Songs

[broadwaysfguy]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 10:40am

What are your favorite Frank Sinatra covers of Musical Theatre and movie musical songs?

Frank must have truly loved musicals, judging by how many of his recordings came from musicals (he chose all his own songs to record at least from the early 1950s on)

I was stunned recently to listen to his version of "Ol Man River", which he performed at a show Dr Martin Luther King Jr attended. People near King stated Frank's version brought him to tears...

Other favorites of mine include:

Where or When (1940s version)

Some Enchanted Evening

Guys & Dolls (1962 version with Dean Martin)

 

What are yours?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[WOSQ]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 11:42am

Sinatra liked good songs and since much of the Great American Songbook was originally written for shows, there are a lot of recordings of show songs by him.

 

I think his favorite songwriters were the team of Cahn and Van Heusen.

 

All that said, listen to "Golden Moment" from Hot September which was recorded before the show went into rehearsal. Since the show closed out of town, there was no cast recording. It was the play Picnic as a musical.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 11:44am

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 11:46am

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 11:51am

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 11:53am

And...SINATRA SINGS SONDHEIM!

("Good songwriter," says Frank.)

Here is "Good Thing Going," from Merrily We Roll Along

 

[broadwaysfguy]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 1:38pm

wow PalJoey....

 

Franks Good Thing Going is terrific

also classic sinatra quote on sondheim "good songwriter"

the sinatra hbo special also has Gene Kelly telling story of turning frank into a dancer for Anchors Away, and Frank, who had not really danced previously committed to 3-4 hour daily rehearsals to get ready for the picture....

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 1:54pm

He did a whole album of Rodgers & Hammerstein, shortly before he was supposed to do the movie of Carousel. In addition to the hit songs from the four big shows (Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific and King and I), he also does 2 each from Allegro and State Fair.

 

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 1:59pm

And then there were the four albums he did with his Rat Pack buddies after he formed Reprise records. They called it "The Reprise Musical Repertory Theatre":

 

 

 

 

 

 

[broadwaysfguy]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 8:49pm

pal joey 

thanks for these additions

have the guys and dolls cd which is fantastic and was not aware of the other three.

Do you have all of these cds?

I hear the recording quality on the rodgers and hammerstein cd is just ok- iwant it anyway just cause of the songs on it!

in addition to the lps you mentioned, he also did that ive found:

Frank Sinatra sings cole porter

My kind of broadway 1965  (interesting mix includinge Nice Work if you can get it,  hello dolly, lost in the stars)

Frank sinatra sings gershwin  1946

theres also a collection called

Frank Sinatra 40 songs from the musicals

a two cd set released in 2001 that has a variety of songs from gershwin, porter, irving berlin, weill, rodgers and hart, rodgers and hammerstein and others.  I dont know original recording dates-just ordered the cd and will have in a few days...

[broadwaysfguy]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 8:57pm

i wish frank and the rat pack had done My Fair Lady

Would loved to have heard Frank Sinatras Henry Higgins with Ann Margret or angie dickinson as eliza doolittle and dean martin as colonel pickering...maybe bobby darin as freddy and joey bishop or don rickiles as henry doolittle

"Hey-why cant you english talk right...capeesh?"

 

[gavyj]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 9:34pm

I've never been a huge fan of Sinatra's "Send in the Clowns." That isn't to say that it isn't fabulous. I just prefer other recordings.

Regardless, his opening remarks to this performance are particularly good. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke6iMd9PvGY

 

[JayG 2]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 9:59pm

Old Man River is darn good  

 

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 10:46pm

I forgot about "Frank Sinatra sings Cole Porter" and "My Kind of Broadway"--they're both great albums of Frank in his prime.

The Cole Porter has his "I Concentrate on You" and "Night and Day," which are kind of definitive. The new CD release has all sorts of radio goodies, like a very funny duet with Rosemary Clooney on "Cherry Pies Ought to Be You" from Out of This World.

My Kind of Broadway is an odd duck. All different arrangers and sounds, some obscure stuff, some generic stuff. The highlight (for me) is a Nelson Riddle arrangement of "Golden Moment" from the flop show Hot September. Who knows why the hell he included it, but I'm glad he did.

The Gershwin album is more radio stuff, including an unnecessary Porgy and Bess medley with Jane Powell (of all people).

The other album is just a compilation, which is not a crime, but they're just individual songs that happen to be from Broadway.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 10:47pm

[MichelleCraig]

Posted: 4/10/15 at 11:01pm

I just love his version of "Lost In The Stars"...

[OlBlueEyes]

Posted: 4/11/15 at 1:07am

 

Ol' Blue Eyes could pick out good songs, but just as important to his success was that he realized the importance of the arrangement to the quality of the recording. One of his signature songs, by Cole Porter and written for a 1936 MGM musical, was "I've Got You Under My Skin." This was a concert standard and owed its popularity as much to Nelson Riddle's huge, swinging arrangement as to Sinatra. You're probably too young to remember this as a top ten hit for the Four Seasons in 1966. Sinatra always recorded live with the band, never singing to a pre-recorded soundtrack.

 

I, too, discovered "Lost in the Stars" not that long ago. Kurt Weill, another European Jew fleeing the Nazis, was not an active composer in the States for very long, but he left some good ones. Judy Garland's recording of "It Never Was You" is a heart wrencher. I guess Weill is best known for "Mack the Knife," but you would never recognize the original from Bobby Darin's swinging take, one-of-the-all-time-most- played recordings.

 

I first heard Sinatra singing "Ol' Man River" in the MGM 1946 biopic on the life of Jerome Kern. It was the last and climactic Kern song in the film. I was appalled that this skinny white boy would attempt to interpret the song with the most gravitas in American theater, a song that was always sung by barrel-chested black tenors.

 

But in a 1963 television special, the second of The Man and his Music specials, he sang it a whole lot differently and it had to at least be taken seriously. That special, available on DVD also features a medley of songs with Antonio Carlos Jobim and the greatest version of "The Lady is a Tramp" ever recorded, a swinging duet with Ella Fitzgerald accompanied by the Count Basie Orchestra.

 

Getting back to the original question, another candidate for a favorite song, everyone's favorite Sinatra song, is "Just the Way You Look Tonight," written for the 1936 Astaire/Rogers film Swing Time and introduced by Astaire. It won the best song Emmy when this category had a lot more competition. According to Wikopedia, in 2004 it was ranked 43rd out of the top 100 film songs by AFI. I think the legions who have covered it would have ranked it higher. You may remember Rod Stewart's success with it in 2002. He sang it well. The Sinatra version, however, relying on his reliance on arrangers, was done as light swing instead of ballad, and that has made it stand out.

A link to Wikopedia if you want to get an idea of how popular this song has been through the years.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_You_Look_Tonight

 

Curiously, both Rebecca Luker and Kelli O'Hara in separate interviews not long ago named Kern as their favority composer.

 

[JayG 2]

Posted: 4/11/15 at 9:01am

I see certain songs can only be sung by certain ethnic groups. I'll have to remember that in the future. Thanks for the enlightenment.

 

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/11/15 at 9:49am

Judy, Frank and Dean

 

 

Or, as Reginald Tresilian calls 'em, "Judy Frank & Beans."

[jayinchelsea]

Posted: 4/11/15 at 10:50am

Some great songs from the 1955 TV version of OUR TOWN, by Van Heusen and Cahn, including the big hit, "Love and Marriage," but also ""The Impatient Years," "Look to Your Heart" and the title tune, which is my favorite. The songs are available on various Sinatra recordings, and a b&w kinescope of the program itself (yes, with both Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint singing!) can be found at ioffer.com.

[broadwaysfguy]

Posted: 4/11/15 at 4:51pm

PalJoey

love your thoughtful opinions and depth of knowledge on Frank and all

things musical theatre. Also love that you stay above the fray and catfights on other threads

 

thanks so much for your contributions to this thread!

 

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 4/11/15 at 11:11pm

OlBlueEyes,

Kurt Weill wrote (by my count) at least seven full-length musicals, operettas and operas in the fewer than 20 years he lived in the U.S. Some of the most famous are:

KNICKERBOCKER HOLIDAY

STREET SCENE

ONE TOUCH OF VENUS, and

LADY IN THE DARK;

his lyricists included everyone from Ira Gershwin to Langston Hughes to Alan Jay Lerner.

I mention this not to correct you, but because you seem to be a fan. Weill actually wrote as many shows in English and without Brecht as he did in German and with him. The composer grew up in Germany fascinated by American idioms and adapted to Broadway with considerable ease. (Unlike Brecht, who never quite found himself in Hollywood and wrote only one great play--GALILEO (written with Charles Laughton)--before Brecht returned to Germany after the war.)

 

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/11/15 at 11:15pm

Regarding "Lost in the Stars"...

With all due deference to Frank and his performance of this song, the definitive recording of it (outside of the context of the show itself) would have to be this rendition of it by Judy:

 

And I think Frank would agree.

[OlBlueEyes]

Posted: 4/12/15 at 2:48am

 

Feel free to correct me. Anytime I'm around this board and there is a topic I think that I know a lot about, I find five to ten people who know more about it.

 

Weill, who as you know died at 50, is one of those artists about whom you can only wonder about what he would have produced if he had lived. He didn't produce enough in this country to be well known. Is Lady in the Dark the only show that occasionally is produced?

 

I just kept running into songs of his during my life. "Pirate Jenny" from the very early and exceptional Judy Collins album In My Life. The Doors, of all people, bending "The Alabama Song" into a piece that fit comfortably into their first album. "My Ship" is considered the big success of Lady in the Dark, I believe, but I saw Lynn Redgrave mug her way through "Jenny" and I loved it. "Poor Jenny, brighter than a penny...."

 

Then when I was in a Judy Garland stage I picked up a cheap double album I found in my local record store. It had three premium recordings on it: her very upbeat version of "That's Entertainment," a heart-breaking "Little Girl Blue," and this incredibly poignant "It Never Was You." I wasn't even sure to whom the song was addressed, but it didn't matter.

 

Or one red star hung low in the west
Or a heart-break call from a Meadow Lark's nest
Made me think for a moment, maybe, it's true
I found him in the star, in the call, in the blue

 

But it never was you
It never was anywhere you
Anywhere, anywhere you.

 

On the other hand, I'm not sure that you could say that Bobby Darin "covered" "Mack the Knife." I don't know if the original evolved into Darin's, or if some very creative people just saw that if the song was turned upside down and backwards that you could have three minutes of bliss. I might say that Darin's recording was "based on" the song by Weill.

 

Ah, verbose as usual.