Supplied Image Tim Tamashiro, a jazz singer, speaker, entertainer and former national radio host will be at the Esplanade on Feb. 14 with When You’re Smiling. It’s a story song cocktail based around The Rat Pack — Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.
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Tim Tamashiro aims to have you smiling – both at his show this week and long after it’s over. That’s what a cocktail should do after all.
Tamashiro – a jazz singer, speaker, entertainer and former national radio host – delivers what he calls a “story/song cocktail” like no else. He’s coming to the Esplanade on Friday with When You’re Smiling, in which he shares the stories and songs of The Rat Pack – Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.
“The Rat Pack have been my go-tos for decades,” Tamashiro said recently. “I’ve always adored their way of entertaining and their abilities. I think they’re such special entertainers and at one point in time they were some of the best known entertainers in the world.”
Looking forward to being back at the Esplanade after a long absence, Tamashiro admits he’s not an impersonator and “can’t tap dance like Sammy or drink like Frank.” This show is built more on the stories of the trio and their lives when the group were the unofficial Kings of Las Vegas in the 1960s. He says one of the more surprising stories that he talks about in the show is that Dean Martin was sober and merely played the role of a drunk.
He said stories like that and others are what he adores about doing the show night after night. As soon has he starts telling a story the audience is on the edge of their seats.
“They lean forward and go ‘OK, what happens next?'” Tamashiro said. “There’s no big theatrics or anything. It’s me telling a story and then performing the songs as they come up. It’s such a magical place to be with the audience.”
The shows are magical now, but When You’re Smiling originated in a tough spot.
Tamashiro had been booked for similar story and song performances with the legendary Tommy Banks a few years ago, shows that had to be changed when Banks was diagnosed with cancer. Tamashiro says Banks insisted he keep the shows, and Tamashiro worked to create a replacement. The result was When You’re Smiling.
Tamashiro will make audience members smile easily enough at the show, but to keep smiling will be more up to them. He lays down the path though: Ikigai, which is to follow your life’s worth.
The philosophy comes from his grandparents’ birthplace in Okinawa, Japan and basically means to follow four directions.
Do what you love, do what you’re good at, do what the world needs and do what you can be rewarded for.
“Those four simple but very difficult directions are something that if you study them and do some exploration to find out even what the first two are then the world has a tendency of going ‘Thank you for being yourself,'” he said.
“My Ikigai is to delight and that’s what I love to do when I tell the stories of Frank and Dean and Sammy and sing songs. I love to do it off the stage and meet people and talk with you on the phone, and write books and all that kind of thing. So I don’t have to get up and guess what I’m going to do every day. I just do more me. And that’s something everybody can do. That’s my battle cry for Ikigai – to do more you.”
Tickets are available online at tixx.ca, by calling 403-502-8777, and in person at the Esplanade box office or the Medicine Hat Mall guest services desk. Showtime is 7:30 p.m.
