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Frankie Moreno tries to balance art and showbiz in new show

This is a risky move for Frankie Moreno.

Seriously. No metaphor.

During his lounge days, and even his three years on a bandstand stage at the Stratosphere, the only physical dangers to the high-energy entertainer came from fans buying him too many shots.

But his new show at Planet Hollywood has moving parts. Like the vintage Neumann microphone that rises up on an elevator, through a trap door, “which opens and closes throughout the show,” Moreno notes. “It’s the perfect square that, if I stand on it, I’ll fall right through, all the way to the bottom floor, to the cement.”

Factor in moving video panel screens and traveling band risers. “So many things could go wrong,” he says. “I’ve just never been in a position where I’ve had to think about that. I’m walking through a new house in the dark and I haven’t learned my way around it yet.”

Added challenge: Painkillers.

Moreno threw his back out during rehearsals, just two days before the first ticketed show of “Under the Influence” last Saturday (its official opening night is set for Tuesday). The show went on with the help of a chiropractor, a corset brace and, of course, alcohol, which Moreno still solicits from the stage. Some things never change.

When a fan in the audience yelled up about a potentially bad mix with the pain pills, Moreno quipped, “Hashtag, Elvis.”

But no complaining. All this is, in fact, what Moreno has worked years to achieve. And yes — now we’re back to the metaphoric financial sense of the term — it is risky for Moreno and Base Entertainment, producer of the new show.

What they are attempting is rare: To promote an entertainer of limited fame, with original songs of limited familiarity, in a year-round residency that will compete for attention with the bigger-name stars downstairs in Planet Hollywood’s larger theater, and elsewhere on the Strip.

One way of doing that might be to keep costs (and ticket prices) in the bargain basement, as Moreno did at the Stratosphere. Instead, Base has invested in the moving parts: a production design to make Moreno’s show visually comparable to those of the bigger-name stars.

“If the ticket price is the same as all the other stuff, the show needs to match,” he says.

And so, seven video panels help create a drive-in movie for Moreno’s original “Moonlight Matinee,” before his partner Lacey Schwimmer — of “Dancing With the Stars” fame — pops out of a Shelby Cobra for another original, “Diva.”

“We’re totally at the mercy of computers,” Moreno says of the automation. “Once I get all that down, then I can make it my show.”

Even so, Saturday’s debut for an understanding audience full of friends, fans and supporters, left room for plenty of between-song chatter. Just the type of banter that built Moreno’s loyal following through his lounge years at the Golden Nugget and the Palms.

“The trick was keeping that mentality of the loose feel, but in a big show,” he says. “That’s very hard to do. One’s a very conversational thing, and one’s a very grand, structured arena rock show.”

But he studied the masters: Las Vegas show videos of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. “When they do their number it’s big, and they’re in it. And then in between, that’s when they’re loose. That to me is the definition of the old-school Vegas act.”

“I’m trying to combine being an artist and a writer and a creator of music with being this showbiz Vegas guy,” he notes. “It’s a fine line. I’m kinda in this weird situation.”

Indeed. Moreno’s career to date could be held up as an example of just how hard it is to make it in show business. How many breaks does a performer get without getting the one that puts you over?

The Santa Cruz, California, native seemed to have instinctive piano skill as a child, absorbing the musicianship of his father and uncle’s local band before appearing on “Star Search” in 1989, when he was 11.

He worked his way up from the lounges to a berth at the Stratosphere in late 2011, after a 2009 album by classical violinist Joshua Bell, “At Home With Friends,” put their version of “Eleanor Rigby” on the same album — and plane of association — as duets with Sting, Josh Groban and Kristin Chenoweth.

During his three years at the Stratosphere, Moreno performed one of his originals, “Tangerine Honey,” on “Dancing With the Stars,” which buoyed digital sales of his self-titled, self-released album.

He ended the Stratosphere run in late 2014 and started shopping for fancier digs on the Strip. Part of last year was devoted to spreading his name awareness through various opportunities, such as being one of four vocalists on a New York Pops “Let’s Be Frank” tribute to Sinatra at Carnegie Hall last April.

In town, he ended up doing 45 shows last year in the Cabaret Jazz venue at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts. Those gave birth to the “Under the Influence” idea of tribute shows that dug into deep album cuts by the likes of Ray Charles, and even explored artists who influenced those greats.

Cabaret Jazz was where Scott Armstrong of Base Entertainment came to see Moreno, and eventually offered the Planet Hollywood theater, ending a year of flirtations with smaller venues at Caesars Palace and Mandalay Bay, and a comparably sized one at the Rio (where Base ended up putting the musical “Rock of Ages”).

Moreno likes the mix of originals and covers in the show, and the way they will be linked by the retro-soul sound that Amy Winehouse and other British singers brought back into fashion.

His own songwriting can be argued as the blessing or the curse of his knack for mimicry. “They think they’ve heard it, but they have not,” he says of the gift honed working for a Nashville music publisher in the late ’90s, which fell between high school and his 2002 move to Las Vegas.

“As a songwriter, I gravitated to that real quick,” he says. “Understanding that if I’m going to pitch a song to Keith Urban, you can’t sing it like Travis Tritt.” A demo had to convince an artist, “This is what it will sound like when you do it, only you’re going to do it even better.”

So now, instead of opening the show with a James Brown cover, Moreno wrote his own James Brown-sounding original, “I Gotta Have It.”

“Everything comes from something,” he says. “There’s a reason people respond to those cover songs. Those cover songs were written commercially, to be for the masses.”

And now Moreno hopes he is too.

Read more from Mike Weatherford@reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.

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