The Sinatra hits we can't wait to hear in Sinatra The Musical

Sinatra The Musical promises the ultimate night out for fans of Ol’ Blue Eyes. Here’s everything you need to know about the songs lighting up the Aldwych this summer.

Sinatra The Musical arrives at the Aldwych Theatre this June, and if the promise of Joel Harper-Jackson stepping into the shoes of Ol’ Blue Eyes isn’t enough to get you excited, the soundtrack should seal the deal.

Featuring 26 of Sinatra’s greatest hits across two acts, the show weaves the songs into the fabric of the story. Each number has been chosen to illuminate a moment in his life, a relationship, a turning point – a fitting tribute to a man whose music was something of an emotional diary.

From the swagger of his early Capitol years to the bruised romanticism of later periods, the setlist spans the full arc of one of the most extraordinary careers in popular music. Here are the songs we’re most excited to hear, and why they matter.

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Come Fly with Me

If you need a single song to announce that Frank Sinatra has arrived, this is it. The opening track from his 1958 album of the same name, Come Fly with Me is pure big-band exuberance: brassy, swaggering and utterly irresistible.

Written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, it became one of the defining statements of the Sinatra persona: the man who made everything look effortless and glamorous. Hearing it in a theatre with a live orchestra is going to be something special.

I’ve Got You Under My Skin

One of the jewels of the Great American Songbook, Cole Porter’s I’ve Got You Under My Skin became something else entirely in Sinatra’s hands.

His 1956 Capitol recording, arranged by Nelson Riddle with a trombone solo that builds to almost unbearable tension before releasing into euphoria, is widely considered one of the greatest vocal performances ever committed to tape.

A song about being consumed by desire, unable to resist what you know is going to cost you, it is perfectly suited to a show that traces the emotional highs and lows of one of the most dramatic lives in popular music history.

In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

Sinatra The Musical - London. Photo by Alexis Chabala and Seamus Ryan — *Sinatra The Musical – London. Photo by Alexis Chabala and Seamus Ryan*

If Come Fly With Me is Sinatra at his most triumphant, this is Sinatra at his most exposed. The title track from his landmark 1955 concept album, which is widely regarded as one of the first true song cycles in popular music, it captures a man alone at 3am, unable to sleep, unable to stop thinking about someone he has lost.

Intimate and almost unbearably melancholy, it represents a side of Sinatra that the brassy swagger of his big-band recordings sometimes obscures: one where the vulnerability lurks beneath the confidence and the loneliness is only a few paces behind the charm.

On stage, with the full weight of a live performance behind it, it promises to be one of the evening’s most quietly devastating moments.

That’s Life

Released in 1966 and a Top 5 hit on both sides of the Atlantic, That’s Life is Sinatra at his most defiant. It’s a chest-out, chin-up declaration that no matter how many times life knocks you down, you get back up.

It’s also, in the context of this show, the song most directly connected to the crux of the story: the greatest comeback in showbusiness history, staged by a man who had been written off and refused to accept it. Expect the roof to come off the Aldwych when this one lands.

The Best is Yet to Come

*Frank Sinatra. Capitol Archives – Frank Sinatra Enterprises*

Written by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh and recorded by Sinatra in 1964, The Best is Yet to Come is one of those songs that sounds like pure optimism on the surface but carries a complex undertow… the best is yet to come, but we’re not there yet.

It became so closely associated with Sinatra in his later years that it was inscribed on his gravestone. In a show that charts his rise, fall and resurrection, its placement will be worth watching carefully.

Fly Me to the Moon

Originally written in 1954 as In Other Words, the song was transformed by Sinatra and arranger Quincy Jones into something timeless. In fact, his 1964 recording became so embedded in popular culture that it was played by the Apollo astronauts during the moon landings.

On stage it is one of those songs that needs very little help: the melody does the work, the lyric does the rest, and a great vocal performance simply gets out of its own way.

One For My Baby

A late-night saloon song of the highest order, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s One For My Baby is the sound of a man drinking alone and talking to a bartender who really doesn’t want to hear it.

Sinatra recorded it multiple times across his career, each version slightly darker and more world-weary than the last, as though he grew into the song’s particular brand of dignified desolation as the years went on.

Of all the numbers in the show’s setlist, this is the one that most purely distils what made Sinatra unlike any other popular singer of his era: the sense that he wasn’t performing emotion so much as reporting it.

My Way

The big one. Paul Anka’s English adaptation of a French chanson became, in Sinatra’s hands, the definitive statement of a life lived without apology and the most requested song at funerals in the English-speaking world for several decades running.

It opens Act Two, which is a genuinely bold structural choice: placing the show’s most famous song not at the climax but at the beginning of the second half reframes it entirely, turning it from a valediction into a declaration of intent. This is not a song about looking back. This is a man still in the fight.

New York, New York

The closer. Written for Martin Scorsese’s 1977 film and then adopted by Sinatra as his own signature, New York, New York is one of those songs that has become so much larger than any individual performance that it almost transcends the musician who made it famous.

Ending the show with it is the only possible choice: a full-throated celebration of ambition, reinvention and the refusal to be anything other than exactly what you are. In other words, if it doesn’t bring the house down, something has gone very wrong.

Sinatra The Musical: The full setlist

Act One

All of Me, That’s All, Come Fly With Me, Nancy (With the Laughing Face), The Best Is Yet To Come, All or Nothing at All, Witchcraft, Nice ‘N’ Easy, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, I’m a Fool to Want You, The Hucklebuck, Tennessee Newsboy, That’s Life.

Act Two

My Way, Mule Train, You Make Me Feel So Young, Come Rain or Come Shine, Fly Me to the Moon, Learnin’ the Blues, One For My Baby, I’m Gonna Live Till I Die, Straighten Up and Fly Right, The Way You Look Tonight, I’ve Got the World on a String, Ring-a-Ding-Ding, New York, New York.

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