ANN ARBOR—An aging pop-icon based on Frank Sinatra is the lead character in Andy Kirshner‘s experimental music-theater piece. A doctoral candidate in composition in the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Kirshner is the Hunting Family Graduate Student Fellow at U-M’s Institute for the Humanities.

A piece that began as a jazz song cycle (commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1995) for composer, performer, and librettist Kirshner, the work eventually took on the form of a “retirement” concert, recapping a star’s life and career. The show is a series of exits and entrances, depicting Tony Amore in earlier years, with re-appearances of the aging star, his daughter directing the studio orchestra, and his son hovering in the background as caretaker/valet/manager during Amore’s final appearance at a pledge-week special on public television.

Working with the themes of aging, memory, myth-making, and reality in a culture

that honors celebrity and the media, Kirshner says he chose the Sinatra/Amore

character in part because the aging of a popular figure is so visible.

Film and video clips give us a permanent record of a celebrity’s youth,

Kirshner says, which often stands in jarring contrast to the present

real-life figure.

Over the course of the evening Kirshner’s Amore performs a series of numbers—a big band/be-bop number with female fans crying his name, a cowboy song featuring Tony as a macho playboy, and a confessional saloon song that shows Tony in his existential barroom mode. Finally, Tony offers his version of Sinatra’s “My Way,” an inspirational pop-anthem called “I Could Always Count on Me.”

The show takes the audience back and forth from complex issues of aging and illusion to a lighter look at the macho singer who can croon such lyrics as “Whatever fate befell me, it was me who made it so.”

“I’m trying to create something that is entertaining and funny, but is also a meditation on aging and memory and loss of self,” says Kirshner.

Excerpts from “Relive the Magic” will be performed in Rackham’s Assembly Hall on March 19 beginning with a reception at 8 p.m. and performance at 8:30 p.m. The performance is free and open to the public.

The show in its entirety will be performed at the Michigan Theater at 3 p.m.

Michigan Theater