Rick Michel's Blog

The time has come to present my summation for the blog series on my brand new Las Vegas show, Frank … A Musical Journey. I hope you will be able to take away one thing from this series: writing about this sensational journey doesn’t do the show justice, so you’ll just have to see it for yourself!

 The Voice’s brief and impassioned marriage to the significantly younger Mia Farrow ended (although Farrow recently stated in Vanity Fair that they “never really split up”) when a baby came between them – Rosemary’s Baby to be exact. Frank wanted her for his film The Detective, but she wouldn’t give up the lead role in the classic horror movie, so he delivered her divorce papers to the set.

 The beginning of the Frank and Barbara period is a good time to insert a perfect musical interlude, with what may be my favorite Sinatra song, All of You.

 Lady Blue Eyes would become the woman that would retain his heart for good. Barbara Marx and a somewhat mellowed and finely aged Frank Sinatra tied the knot in 1976, exactly one week after the country’s bicentennial celebrations, and they would remain married until his death in 1998.

 What’s amazing, with such a spectacular career already crafted, is that Frank was still belting out some of his biggest and most memorable hits. Thinking about New York, New York or the incredible How do you Keep the Music Playing? and how such songs became such staggering staples to a Sinatra repertoire boggles my mind.

 The other thing that strikes me about almost all of the songs in the Sinatra songbook is their timelessness. Whether he started singing them with Tommy Dorsey or solo, they are completely recognizable as his songs and they are still used today and that’s something you can’t say about everyone’s music.

 2015 is going to be a huge Frank Sinatra year, marking his 100^th birthday, and that’s just another reason why I’m so excited about Frank … A Musical Journey. I hope you are too.