Draxl’s back

Cute crooner Tim Draxl will return to the stage in Sydney during July for performances of musical play Freeway – The Chet Baker Journey at the Sydney Opera House.

Devised and written by Draxl and Bryce Hallett, the intimate show fuses fragments of Baker’s prodigious career and self-destructive life with his poignant ballads and classic songs, including My Funny Valentine, Let’s Get Lost, These Foolish Things, You Don’t Know What Love Is, Look For the Silver Lining, That Old Feeling and There Will Never Be Another You.

Jazz veteran Ray Alldridge will join the show as musical director and pianist. He is joined by rising trumpeter Eamon Dilworth, drummer Dave Goodman and Dave Ellis on bass.

Draxl, who recently featured in Stephan Elliott’s romantic comedy A Few The Best Men, co-starring Olivia Newton-John and Xavier Samuel, said that when he first heard Baker’s version of the Rodgers and Hart song, My Funny Valentine, he was hooked.

“The haunting, melancholic tone of his voice in that song resonated with me at a time in my life when I was discovering myself not only as an artist but who I was as a person,” he saïd.

“When I started listening to Chet Baker I imagined him to be this idealistic ’50s pin-up boy who was clean-cut and very together only to realise he was on heroin and deeply tormented… towards the end he was virtually shunned in his homeland and anything but the ideal posterboy.”

The show began life at the tiny jazz and music club El Rocco in Kings Cross in October 2010. More recently it has toured to Brisbane and was part of last year’s annual Adelaide Cabaret Festival.

Freeway – The Chet Baker Journey will be at the Sydney Opera House Studio July 20-22.

Bookings: From Friday, March 30 via sydneyoperahouse.com