Music: Thatza My Boy

From time to time, some richly imaginative columnist likens Club Singer Enzo Stuarti to the late Mario Lanza. But the comparison is fair to neither man. Lanza had a voice of genuine operatic dimensions, and he misused it sadly. Stuarti has a voice of cocktails-and-dancing dimensions, and he makes the most of it.

With the aid of electronic amplification, it has a vibrant power reminiscent less of Lanza than of Tony Bennett.

Only the formula is Lanza’s—a mixture of show tunes, sentimental Italian love songs and an occasional operatic aria. At Luigi’s nightclub in Atlantic City last week, Stuarti was first heard as an offstage voice throbbing out Yours Is My Heart Alone; by the time he sailed into the last bars he was standing in a lavender spot, stage center, teeth gleaming to the glow of applause. After that, in a handsome dramatic-tenor voice, Stuarti worked through such standards as If Ever I Would Leave You, Arrivederci, Roma, Sorrento, Three Coins in the Fountain. The evening ended with a tearful Danny Boy.

Down to Work. Stuarti wraps up all this dolcezza in what he calls his “there are no strangers, only friends I haven’t met” approach. A slender, handsome, loosely jointed man with a wild mop of brown hair, he woos his audiences with a wide assortment of audio-visual aids: a nifty little tango step, a flinging of the arms, a flexing of the knees, and a sort of deep lumbar lean that threatens to topple him over backward. He may drift around the room, mike in hand, gazing smokily into the eyes of ringside ladies, who invariably gaze smokily back. Or he may rip open his collar, tear off his string bow tie and mutter: “Now I can really get down to work.” When he sings Arrivederci, Roma, he breaks off to speak of his mother: “I wish she were here. From the back of the room you’d hear her little voice saying ‘Thatza my boy.’ ”

At 35, Stuarti has been in the big money ($3,000 a week) only since last year, when he made his debut at Manhattan’s

Hotel Plaza—a last-minute replacement for ailing Singer Katyna Ranieri. The Plaza usually prefers its singers female and sophisticated—Hildegarde, say, or Eartha Kitt—but Stuarti was a hit from the first.

Suddenly he was just where he had wanted to be for 13 unmelodious years.

Better Billing. Son of a Roman baker, Stuarti came to the U.S. when he was 13, later survived the wartime torpedoing of a Liberty ship before he settled down to a diet of slim pickings on Broadway—supporting roles and choruses. He had no better luck touring small nightclubs and occasionally appearing on television. He seemed to hit bottom in 1960 when he recorded a slow-selling album titled A Tribute to Mario Lanza, with his own name printed in minuscule letters across the bottom of the jacket. Stuarti’s rising fortunes, as a matter of fact, can be measured by that very same album: now that he is a nightclub success, it has sold 150,000 copies in five printings, each of which has given successively better billing to Enzo. The latest jacket copy ignores Lanza altogether. Its title is Enzo Stuarti Sings the World’s Great Arias.