It’s the virtual Frank

I used to hate Frank Sinatra. When I was young I chafed at the personality, the blustery old man with the pinkie ring and bad hair and porkpie hat shouting on television. He was one cliche after another. For my taste, Frank’s booze, broads and back-of-the-limo lifestyle were six flavors of not cool. And worse was that croaky voice of decadence and neglect crooning “New York/New York” after the games broadcast from Yankee Stadium.

But then I got old -- or at least older -- and discovered the original Frank, the early voice. I also saw some Ava Gardner movies.

Apparently a lot of people mature into Sinatra that way, and into the adult emotions he interpreted so powerfully. It also helps if you move to Manhattan, turn 30 and live alone in an apartment near P.J. Clarke’s, the 3rd Avenue bar where no matter how late it was, you could hear that stoic voice on the jukebox defining the city at night. And then you get even older -- too old to shake your behind in public and scream, “Do ya think I’m sexy?” And then he has you. Sinatra makes sense.

Although he has been dead for five years, Frank Sinatra is returning this week through the miracle of technology to Radio City Music Hall. “Frank Sinatra, His Voice, His World, His Way,” directed by Des McAnuff, opens Wednesday and runs for 15 performances. Using film, video and a live 40-piece orchestra, the show is supposed to turn back the years and provide a close, if not eerily larger-than-life, view of the man, in his prime at 42, his spirits restored, his phrasing perfect.

The producers are particularly excited about discovering a cache of 35-millimeter film that Sinatra made of himself in 1957 and 1958 singing mostly a capella, or with just a piano. Through a process known as rotoscoping, the backgrounds on the unearthed film were eliminated so a lone Sinatra can be projected across a series of moving 3-D panels on the Radio City stage. It may not be quite as vivid as a hologram, but Ol’ Blue Eyes should seem very much with us, appearing at times as tall as 30 feet with the Rockettes prancing beneath him.

One of the marketing goals of this extravaganza, backed by members of Sinatra’s family, Mercedes-Benz and American Express, is to introduce the great singer to a generation that has yet to have the pleasure.

Although there has been a resurgence of the cool cocktail culture, both Elvis and the Beatles, whose combined careers did not last half as long as Sinatra’s, continue to eclipse him among 22-year-olds, probably because of aggressive marketing. Perhaps it is hard to wrap such a long, nuanced career as Sinatra’s into a single CD like the Beatles’ “1” or an amazing line like “Before Anyone Did Anything Elvis Did Everything.” Still, he was the Chairman of the Board.

During a rehearsal break last week, executive producer James Sanna, whose idea it was to root through the Sinatra archives in Los Angeles where the 1950s films were found, said once young people discover how “cool Frank was in his prime, what a genius he was, they’ll have a whole new appreciation of him.”

If the hope is to draw a younger audience to Sinatra, why doesn’t the 90-minute show include performers like Robbie Williams or Norah Jones, singing the standards? “This is about Frank,” said Sanna. “Only Frank Sinatra can be Frank Sinatra.” The only live voice on stage (other than a gospel choir) will be that of jazz star John Pizzarelli, who will lead the orchestra and narrate Sinatra’s life. Pizzarelli will also sing one “duet” with a virtual Sinatra.

Skeptics have questioned whether the promoters can really sell 85,000 tickets at $95 for the best seats. Sanna said already 60,000 are gone, reminding me that the location alone makes the show a sure success. A few blocks from Times Square, where Sinatra burst on the scene at the old Paramount Theater and just across the river from Hoboken, N.J., where Sinatra was born, Radio City is the obvious place to showcase the legend, Sanna said. It is also where Sinatra appeared live half a dozen times, although never for 15 performances in a row.

Still, those who revere Sinatra are concerned that the show might somehow dishonor his legend. “When you invigorate someone in such an enormous way after he is dead and have him so central in front of an auditorium of that size, it makes one wonder,” said Jonathan Schwartz, a well-known New York radio personality and unofficial Sinatra historian. “I just hope it’s not grotesque.”

Author Pete Hamill, who will be among several celebrities including Don Rickles and P. Diddy to appear in video, talking about Sinatra’s influence, was optimistic that, if nothing else, New Yorkers -- even older ones -- could have a good time.

And then he summed up the hold that Sinatra has on this city: “Try to imagine a New York bar at 2 in the morning, even now, without the sound of Sinatra,” said Hamill, who wrote “Why Sinatra Matters” shortly after he died in May 1998. “It’s like imagining a roadside honky-tonk in the South without Hank Williams or Webb Pierce. Sinatra was the voice of cities, and the capital -- then and now -- of that urban America was New York. So what better place to mount this homage?” If the show is decently received, the promoters may bring it to other cities, maybe even park it permanently in Las Vegas.

For now, however, the ghost of Sinatra is opening in a place where you can’t help but feel the history. The artist won’t really be there and there won’t be any new music. But a lot of people will love when he sings because he’s not Frank, he’s not Sinatra, he is New York: Giuliani’s hubris, the street-level wisdom of a cab driver, the newest wave of down-and-out immigrants, the pain of a lost dream.

And if he can make a comeback from up there, he truly can make it anywhere.