Bob Anderson comes face-to-face with his idol in ‘Frank: The Man, The Music’

By John Katsilometes

Published Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Updated Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015 | 6:24 p.m.

This is when the artist becomes the art.

The human canvas at the moment is Bob Anderson, sitting stoically in a swivel chair, his body covered in a plastic sheet. He glows, his face lit brightly by a pair of auxiliary lamps clipped to a wide makeup mirror.

The scene is far removed from the stage at Palazzo Theater, where Anderson is to star in “Frank: The Man, The Music.” We’re in the level beneath the venue, tucked away in the star’s makeup room, where Anderson is to inhabit the persona and very appearance of one of his idols.

Anderson is himself a wonderful vocal impressionist and an expert conveyor of art by any estimation. But here, he is the tableau for another artist, makeup master Kazu Tsuji, one of the highest-regarded individuals practicing this craft in the world.

Tsuji was nominated for Oscars for his work on “Norbit” and “Click.” He provided the makeup and facial reconstruction in such movies as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Looper,” “Salt,” “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and the revised “Planet of the Apes” franchise. A pioneer in this field, Tsuji shifted emphasis seven years ago and has focused on art sculpture.

That evolution in his craft has made this project a rarity. Tsuji is making over Anderson to resemble Frank Sinatra for the new production “Frank: The Man, The Music” at Palazzo. The show opened Saturday night and plays Tuesdays through Saturdays with all shows set for 8 p.m. aside from the Friday performances, which are at 9 p.m. (Tickets are on sale at the Venetian website; prices are $71.50, $82.50 and $93.50. VIP packages are $176.)

Anderson has performed vocal “interpretations” of superstar singers throughout his career, with Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Bobby Darin, Mel Torme and Tom Jones among them. His shows at the Top of the Dunes from 1975-’86 were the sort of late-night, post-show, Old-Vegas hang that today’s entertainers have been trying to revive over the past several years.

But Anderson, ringleader of the nights when the stars of the Strip would show up to cut up, has never performed as a fully realized impressionist. He has never donned the makeup and costumes of any of those star performers.

Until now.

To make himself as convincing as humanely possible as the character of Sinatra, Anderson sits for 2 1/2 hours as Tsuji performs his stunning makeover. Even as you watch the entire process, it seems as if the artist has performed magic to turn Anderson’s face into Ol’ Blue Eyes.

Those are used, too. Blue contact lenses. This is one of the halts in the process, which is not so glamorous and is often tedious to the point of frustration. Anderson attempts to stick one of the blue-hued lenses under his eyelid, and tears spill down his cheek. Tsuji is ready with saline solution to wash out that eye and press the cosmetic eye in place.

Anderson coughs, having swallowed a little of this fluid. He spits into a nearby wastebasket.

“This eye is bothering me,” he says. “But I can’t be Ol’ Blue Eyes without blue eyes.”

Anderson’s dedication to this process, and his personal and professional patience, is crucial to the development of this character. He sits almost motionless, speaking sparingly and even holding his breath as Tsuji leans in with latex strips of fake skin, air gun full of beige toner and scissors to clip back some of Anderson’s bushy head of hair.

“We need more lights,” Tsuji requests, which leads to the delivery of lamps from the stage. “We need another fan in here, too.” When fellow artist Ron Wild, an accomplished makeup man for 30 years, asks, “Are the fans for cooling him down or for the fumes?” Tsuji replies, “The fumes.” The stinging scent of chemicals and glue fills the room.

When asked what he thinks of as he sits still, gazing at his protracted change in appearance, Anderson says, “My lines, mostly. I have a lot to remember in this show. But my mind wanders, too. I feel like I’m absorbing what’s going on, and it does help me feel like I am him. And that helps me really get into the character.”

At the end, just making his time for the show’s final dress rehearsals, Anderson stands and straightens his shoulders. His new skin is shaded in what he calls a “Palm Springs tan,” and jokes, “Mr. Sinatra is ready. Where’s my tux?”

***

The effort to bring Anderson to the stage as Sinatra has been an oft-discussed topic in the city for the past three years or so, at least. Anderson has been based in Branson, Mo., and later Savannah, Ga., after leaving Las Vegas in 2003 because of a dearth of work.

But he returned to town in November 2012 with a performance of his wide array of voices at Cabaret Jazz in the Smith Center. The next fall, the man who describes himself as “one of the last of the old supper-club performers” played a supper club — the Italian American Club on East Sahara Avenue.

Last May, at Venetian Theater, Anderson produced the show his longtime friends and supporters had been wanting: A fully evolved, expertly staged and musically robust version of the show he is performing today down the hall at Palazzo Theater. Anderson’s show is bolstered by energetic input and concepts of by Hoboken Productions and executive producer and director Stephen Eich (the former manager of Steppenwolf Theater Company and current managing director of Geffen Playhouse) and Sinatra’s own longtime music director, Vinnie Falcone.

During the final dress rehearsal, the three men ping-pong directives around the theater. The musicians in the 32-piece orchestra wait to play, sometimes seeming an interminable amount of times. The 12-piece string section barely plays in the first 30 minutes.

Stage monitors are a concern at this particular moment. Anderson is to be summoned to the stage behind the voiceover, “Under a canopy of stars! One man and one venue set the gold standard! Together, they are legends. On the site of the Sands’ Copa Room, the incomparable Vince Falcone and his great band, welcome ‘Frank: The Man, The Music!’ ”

The intro is played repeatedly.

“The announcement is not loud enough in the monitor,” says Falcone, always known to be a taskmaster during rehearsals. “And we need the organ in the bass monitor and in the drum monitor.”

Eich says, “Who else is having problems with their monitors?”

Anderson himself steps in, now fully made over as Sinatra, and shouts, “Is there anybody who needs to hear something that they are not hearing? Is everybody hearing what they need to hear? Tell me now!”

The monitors and mics calibrated, Anderson and the orchestra swoons with, “Come fly with me! Let’s fly, let’s fly awaaaay …” At least two of the musicians in his immediate vicinity, guitar great Joe Lano and master violinist Rebecca Ramsay, played behind the real Sinatra in his days in Las Vegas.

Anderson sings in that resonant Sinatra-styled voice, but he is not airing it out just yet. He spins through the great Sinatra standards you’d want to hear: “Summer Wind,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “My Kind of Town,” “Luck Be a Lady Tonight,” “Fly Me To the Moon” and “Maybe This Time.” Four tall pillars bracket the set, and a drooped curtain is bathed in a shifting spectrum of color.

The scene changes to reflect Capitol Records studios for “You Make Me Feel So Young.” He dons a trench coat and smokes a cigarette for “One More For My Baby (And One More for the Road).” He lures Lano to the front for a cozy acoustic cover of “The Girl From Ipanema.”

Anderson rolls to the finish with an encore medley, peppered with “Witchcraft,” “Strangers in the Night,” “Night and Day,” “That’s Life” and a showstopping “My Way.”

He delivers it all with the familiar tilt of the head and a hand that sways along to the rhythm of the music. If you are close enough to the front of the theater, in the two rows of round tables and padded chairs, you can see the blue eyes.

***

As he’s finished working on Anderson, Tsuji is effectively handing the responsibility of the singer’s makeover to Wild, who has been jotting pages of notes into a notebook for nearly three hours. Tsuji is an instructor on this day, not the primary artist.

“It’s an honor to watch him work,” Wild says, “because he doesn’t do this anymore.”

The change in appearance has been performed and perfected without use of any image of Sinatra. There are no photos or drawings whatsoever of the real thing.

“I used photos when I first started working on Bob, and I have that still in my memory,” Tsuji says. “But to have a photograph here, I would be trying to duplicate exactly (Sinatra’s) features, and that is impossible. I am trying to make Bob look very much like him, but there is no way to make him exact.”

But you can be close enough to evoke that look, that sound, that feel. It’s what Bob Anderson has stood for his entire career, and in that way he has played the role perfectly.

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.