“For those of you who only know me as an actor,” Kevin Spacey said, a few songs into his set, “you might be asking yourself, ‘What the hell is going on?'”
Essentially, what the hell was going on was a fantasy realized for the 55-year-old award-winning actor: the opportunity to sing from the Great American Songbook, backed by a big band and strings, in a world-class concert hall. For many in the crowd, too, it was a fantasy come true to be so close to Spacey, especially at times when the House of Cards star sauntered down the aisles to sing to and high-five his adoring fans.
Was it any more than fantasy, though? Well, yes and no.
Spacey can sing — there’s no doubt about that. In a nearly two-hour set spanning songs made popular by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and others, only one flat note stuck out. Moreover, like a true thespian, Spacey sells these songs impeccably: either cradling the microphone stand with outstretched arms on ballads, or falling to his knees and punching the air on uptempo numbers. At the end of Dean Martin’s hit “You’re Nobody ’til Somebody Loves You,” he arched impossibly backward, held the microphone high for a long, sustained final note, lashed at the orchestra for a final downbeat and dropped the mic dramatically.
But while Spacey’s fame allows him the luxury of hiring a full orchestra — a dream for plenty of more-talented vocalists, to be sure — the emotional resonance that these standards provide a space for simply wasn’t there. Spacey loves this material and his enthusiasm for it is contagious. But he’s still an actor portraying a singer, and he seems to know it: “The fact that some of you paid hundreds of dollars for a less-professional version of what you can get for less than three dollars on iTunes warms my heart,” he confessed.
