Review: Santino Fontana's BY REQUEST at 54 Below Is Off-the-Walls Fun

Singer and actor Santino Fontana is supremely charming, charismatic enough to pull off making you fall in love with him a little whether he’s playing the antihero, the charming prince or the charming prince as the antihero, as he does in Disney’s Frozen. If you’re free tonight or tomorrow, you can still catch him in his craziest venture yet, Santino Fontana: By Request, where he is performing a completely different show with a completely different setlist nightly, entirely composed of audience requests. (Read a Q&A with him about the show here.)

The four-show run began on Wednesday September 11 and runs through tomorrow, Saturday September 13, 2024; all shows at 7 pm. On the opening night on September 11th, Fontana took the stage and began the show with “I’ve Got Your Numbers,” a little twist on the classic jazz standard from Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh’s Little Me, waving the “numbers” on the audience-inspired setlist as he sang. After the opening song, he greeted everyone with, “Thank you for coming – this was a terrible idea.” The crowd broke into laughter as he continued, “When 54 Below asked me to do a show the week of September 11th and Friday the 13th...” To demonstrate how the day was already off to a bad start, he showed everyone a piece of metal and informed the crowd that during the rehearsal earlier, the bathroom door handle had broken off in his hand. The 54 Below staff offered to fix it, and he said “No. I’m keeping this.”

However, despite the auspicious date, the show was a blast from start to finish. Fontana is a magnetic performer, and the fun of the “anything goes”-style format brought some memorable moments beyond your typical cabaret show. At one point, Fontana invited an audience member up to duet with him on “Love Is an Open Door” from Frozen, and she drew cheers as she went from a tiny bit of stage fright and struggling to remember the lyrics at the beginning to belting and hitting the high notes with aplomb. The entire audience felt connected by the end of that song.

Throughout the evening, Fontana showed off his extremely wide range of talents. The man is a gorgeous singer, as he proved with a traditional rendition of “Ten Minutes Ago” from Cinderella, a role he originated on Broadway, but he also has a talent for infusing his singing voice with comedy, as fans of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend know all too well. During “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful,” he hit every note in the song and sang beautifully while pantomiming the pain he was in during that show’s run. (He asked to wear high heels on stage because he didn’t feel that he was “tall, very tall” as the lyrics called his character – a move he regretted after realizing how much it hurt to lift Cinderella nine or ten times a show in heels.) He even showed off his dramatic chops, reciting a Shakespearean monologue to the rapt audience.

Fontana invited his special guest for the evening, Lilli Cooper, his co-star in Tootsie, up to sing “Greater Good,” a song he had co-written with wife Jessica Fontana for a movie they filmed during the pandemic, and a duet on “My First Love Song” from Roar of the Greasepaint – Smell of the Crowd, which Fontana is working on a new production of with a revised book (yes, please!). Both songs were lovely – Cooper and Fontana have a lovely rapport together. The other nights of the run featured guests Erika Henningsen (last night, on Thursday September 12), Tootsie co-stars Reg Rogers and Andy Grotelueschen (tonight) and Kate Baldwin tomorrow night.

There were plenty of fun moments throughout the show, which was rehearsed very little due to the nature of the audience request concept. Music director Dan Lipton went gamely along with everything, accompanying Fontana on the piano as the show went through sudden in-the-moment changes. Fontana took the piano for “You’re Gonna Hear from Me,” a lovely song from Inside Daisy Clover that he’d learned just for this show, during which he played a hilarious montage of his early voice-over work.

The setlist reflected the audience’s eclectic taste in music. Fontana sang a silky smooth “Once in Love With Amy,” the mega-hit from Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley? (Mega-hit of the 40s, that is.) Midway through the song, Fontana told the story of what turned that song into a hit: on the opening night, Ray Bolger forgot the lyrics, but a child of someone in the production was sitting in the front row, and he started shouting out the lyrics. Bolger took advantage of this and led the audience in a singalong, which was so popular they started doing it at every performance, turning the song into a hit. In honor of that, Fontana led the audience at 54 Below into a singalong on the last verse.

With By Request, Fontana turned an insane show concept into a thrilling evening of cabaret.

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Don’t miss the next two performances tonight and tomorrow – tickets are available on 54 Below’s website.

Follow Santino Fontana on Twitter and Instagram @santinofontana

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