Anthony Crivello and Vanessa Clair Stewart

Louis and Keely Live at the Sahara is big on the music the two performed, and is a treat for fans of jazz or any open-minded music listeners. There's a lot of music, but the show is also a biography, directed by co-writer Taylor Hackford, who proved he knows something about music business biographies with his Oscar-winning film Ray. The story is framed as a fantasy memoir told by Prima as he is deep in the three-year coma that lasted from 1975 until his death in 1978. The show opens with Prima in a hospital bed, and we hear a brief bit of expository background courtesy of an attending doctor and nurse. After they leave, Prima snaps his fingers and rises from the bed to welcome his audience and start his story, which begins with his discovery of a teenaged Smith in 1948. Prima, who'd been a successful entertainer for some thirteen years at this point, brought Smith into the act, shaped her professional persona, and guided her career. The story follows their professional and marital partnership (they wed in 1954) until their divorce and dissolution of the act in 1961.

The two are brought to the stage by a pair of performers who are most capable of re-creating Prima and Smith's music and characters. Tony Award-winning actor Anthony Crivello (Kiss of the Spider Woman) delivers all the crazy, manic energy Prima gave to his act and matches his performance style most effectively. The script shows Prima to be a consummate showman, consumed by the business and interested in little else except women, of whom he married five (including Smith) and romanced many more. Per this story, though, even women and sex took a backseat to performing for this man who vowed never to give a bad performance and is shown here to have kept the act with Smith together for a time even as their marriage was falling apart.

The duo's act was based on Prima's goofy, manic persona in counterpoint to the deadpan demeanor of Smith, who just wanted to sing. Co-author Vanessa Claire Stewart plays Smith and completely captures the singer's crystal-clear and unadorned but expressive vocal style—a delight for anyone tired of the mannered, showy pop vocal styles so popular today. Her character is by far less developed than Prima. Likely, she was less complicated in real life as well, but the device of using Prima as narrator lends itself to giving his character more stage time and weight. Paul Perroni and Erin Mathews play all the other characters and Perroni, playing Frank Sinatra, imitates the singer with just enough of the right speech inflections to suggest 'Ol Blue Eyes, but wisely stopping short of a full-on imitation.

Stewart wrote the first version of the show with Jake Broder, who played Prima in its 2008 inaugural production in North Hollywood. Keely Smith fan Hackford caught that show and joined with Stewart and Broder in expanding it into a full-length musical. That new version, which premiered at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles the next year, has been mounted in Chicago by producer Hershey Felder. As a book musical, it could probably use a little more book. I had trouble following the timeline at times and it would be great to get a better understanding of Prima and Smith's offstage personalities and relationships as well as their onstage images.

Even so, as it is plays right now, there's much to enjoy. There's Crivello's entertaining and charismatic performance and, above all, the music. Stewart's clarion voice covering melodies by the likes of Cole Porter and Harold Arlen and the lyrics of Johnny Mercer—backed up by an on-stage seven-piece jazz band—is reason enough to see the show. The book scenes put the music in a context and, as director, Hackford keeps it all flowing with never a slow spot.

Louis and Keely Live at the Sahara will play through May 3, 2015, at the Royal George Theatre, 1641 North Halsted, Chicago. For tickets, visit Ticketmaster.

Photo: Charles Osgood

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-- John Olson