When Frank Basile was planning this show for the Metropolitan Room, he must have felt he had to make a choice: Make a name for himself in New York cabaret based solely on his sheer talent, or continue to be inextricably linked to Celeste Holm, his 94-year-old movie legend wife who is almost twice his age (and whom he married in 2004). Basile isn’t oblivious to the whispers about his motivations for marrying a much older and (at the time of the marriage) wealthy celebrity, especially when their battle to regain inheritance rights from her sons was played out for all the world to read in a July 2011 New York Times feature. So nobody would have blamed Frank Basile if he wanted his wife simply to look at him adoringly from the audience while he staked out his performing independence. But Basile made an interesting choice; he not only didn’t divorce himself from his connection to Ms. Holm, he embraced it.

And when you watch and hear this strapping, handsome opera singer/crooner with the booming bass perform, you can understand why. There is a warmth, sensitivity and sincerity about Frank Basile that comes through in almost every song he sings and every story he tells about his life. His show theme—memories of his childhood, his parents and their relationship, his development as an opera singer, the evolution of his relationship with Ms. Holm—was rife with emotion and a non-cloying sentimentality that couldn’t help but make him eminently likeable (not to mention that it makes clear why an octogenarian would be attracted to him). But the theme clearly served another purpose for Basile—to reveal to an audience that may know him only through gossip and newspaper stories what he is really all about.

He set the stage for his autobiographical journey with a bouncy version of “I Still Get Jealous” (Sammy Cahn/Jule Styne), a song his music-loving father sang to his mother on their first date. He then delivered “Memories Are Made of This,” as more of a ballad rather than the swinging Dean Martin version. He followed that with “If I Sing” (David Shire/Richard Maltby, Jr.), which was his tribute to his late father’s influence on his singing and during which he struggled to hold back tears. After a Sinatra-esque “I’ve Got the World on a String” (Harold Arlen/Ted Koehler), Basile was in his operatic element knocking out two Italian classics, “O Sole Mio” and “Torna a Surriento,” featuring fine piano work by Musical Director Bob Goldstone. Then in another lower-lip-quivering moment, Joe Gianono supplied a nice guitar lead on Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times,” which Basile’s father sang to his mother when they tried to reconcile after a divorce.

After graduating college, Basile moved to Germany and became an Air Force Band singer, so here he connected Irving Berlin’s “This Is the Army” with a stirring rendition of “America the Beautiful” that elicited bravos from the Met audience (although the anecdotal set-up to the song was a tad long). Once Frank got through “Mama, a Rainbow” from Minnie’s Boys (as a tribute to his mother, who was sitting in the audience next her much-older daughter-in-law), the show was all about him and Holm.

They had met in 1999 at a fundraiser where Basile was singing and, while they didn’t make eye contact “across a crowded room,” “Some Enchanted Evening” seemed the obvious song choice through which to express the story of their first connection and developing romance. Frank segued into another Rodgers and Hammerstein song, “Impossible” from the 1965 TV production of Cinderella (in which Holm played the fairy godmother), and then rocked the room swinging on the Sinatra staple, “The Tender Trap” (Jimmy Van Heusen/Sammy Cahn), with Boots Maleson providing nice support on bass. Basile then produced (with the help of director John-Richard Thompson) a cabaret show ending that would have softened the heart of the most hardened skeptic. Singing the Alan and Marilyn Bergman/Michel Legrand “On My Way to You” directly to Celeste as if there were nobody else in the room, Frank crooned, “If I had changed a single day/ what went amiss or went astray/I may have never found my way to you/I wouldn’t change a thing that happened/on my way to you.”

Leaving the stage to more bravos, the only question was what Frank Basile could do for an encore. Why, of course, have his wife slowly and gingerly make her way to the stage so she could sit next to her husband while he sang their favorite song, “They Didn’t Believe Me” (Jerome Kern/Herbert Reynolds). Holm appeared a bit terrified at first, but was positively beaming by the time her Prince Charming sang, “And when I tell them, and I cert'nly am going to tell them/that I'm the man whose wife one day you'll be/They'll never believe me/They'll never believe me/That from this great big world you've chosen me!”

After a show like this, it would be difficult not to “believe” Frank Basile—on many levels.

Frank Basile returns to the Metropolitan Room Tuesday, Sept. 27 at 7 pm.

Stephen Hanks
Cabaret Scenes
September 13, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org