Sinatra Night Berlin

A Prague format, moved to Budapester Straße

The show did not start in Berlin. It is the work of LiveCity s.r.o., a company registered at Václavská 20 in Prague and represented by Eva Homindova, which has been running Mozart Dinner Prague since 2012 — a costume-and-courses evening of the kind that fills European capitals every summer. Berlin is the company's first German production.

Its closer relative is Sinatra Tribute Prague, which the same producer stages at Art Restaurant Mánes, the functionalist building on the Vltava embankment with Emil Filla's cubist ceiling frescoes and sightlines to Petřín and the castle. That version opens its doors at 18.30, serves dinner from 19.00 and starts the concert at 20.00, with a three-course menu by Jaroslav Zahálka drawn from 1930s Prague cooking, and it rotates acclaimed soloists including Daniel Klánský and Sophia Lamoš.

The Berlin edition premiered on 4 April 2026 at the Hotel Palace, Budapester Straße 45 in Charlottenburg, a hundred metres from Breitscheidplatz and a short walk from Zoologischer Garten. The venue choice is doing a lot of the work: a hotel event hall rather than a club or a theatre, which sets the scale of the band and the shape of the evening before a note is played. The production is marketed under several names across ticket platforms — Sinatra Night Berlin, Sinatra Dinner Berlin, A Night with Sinatra in Berlin — all pointing at the same Saturday slot.

Two voices and four players

The line-up announced for the opening season is small and specific: Emil Wahlgren and Sophia Lamoš on vocals, Kenneth Berkel on piano, Hendrik Nehls on bass, Simona Turk on saxophone and Dexter Stanley-Tauvao on drums. With one horn and no brass section, the Sinatra charts have to be scaled down rather than reproduced, which pushes the evening towards the piano-trio-plus-saxophone treatment of the songbook rather than the Basie-band version of it.

Wahlgren is the Berlin end of the casting. He has Hungarian and Swedish parentage, grew up in Leipzig and has lived in Berlin since 2017; he was a member of the Bundesjazzorchester from 2020 to 2022 and finished his vocal studies at the Berlin Jazz Institute in 2023. He has sung as a guest with Judy Niemack, Torsten Goods, Anna Margolina and Nicolai Thärichen, works with the guitarist Ramiro Olaciregui and the swing group Savoy Satellites, and headlined the A-Trane on 13 November 2024 with his own programme, Stories from the Stars, a space-and-science-fiction song cycle played with Christian Elkjer, Olaciregui, Johannes Schauer and David Guy. That is a wider repertoire than a tribute slot asks for, which tends to show in how the ballads are phrased.

Lamoš carries the Prague lineage into the room. Alongside the Mánes show she fronts a Swingin' Trio working mainly through 1920s and 1930s material — on 12 August 2023 that meant a swing boat on the Brno reservoir, run with the city's transport operator. Having two singers rather than one is the structural decision that separates this from most Sinatra tributes: it allows duets, it gives each voice a rest across a long evening, and it removes the need for anyone to stand on stage pretending to be Frank Sinatra for two and a half hours.

The work itself: a composed evening, not a concert with food attached

The product here is not a record — there is no discography to weigh — it is the dramaturgy. The evening is cut into three concert segments with the dinner service placed in the gaps: doors from 19.00, music at 19.30, soup at 20.00, the second set at 20.30, the main course at 21.00, the third set at 21.30, dessert at 22.00, finish around 22.30. Total running time is listed at two and a half hours. When the format was introduced in April, the stated ambition was that the concert and the dinner should not simply sit side by side but be written as one piece; the timetable is where that claim either holds or does not.

The menu has been revised across the season. At launch it ran pea soup, a choice of beef bourguignon, chicken, cod or a vegetarian main, and chocolate tart or sorbet. The autumn listing is tighter and more specific: a green pea cream with carrot reduction, almond espuma and cress; boeuf bourguignon with burgundy jus, bacon, mushrooms, vegetables and celery purée, with turkey schnitzel as the children's alternative; and a Palace Torte with glazed cherries. Vegetarian and special diets are handled on request.

The repertoire is the expected spine of the Sinatra catalogue — 'Fly Me to the Moon', 'My Way', 'New York, New York' — sequenced, according to the production's own description, from ballads towards the swing material rather than kept at one temperature throughout.

Where it stands in October 2026

The first season was announced in April 2026 as 34 dates running to 19 December. By mid-October the ticket listings had extended further: Saturdays at 19.30 on 24 and 31 October, 7, 14 and 28 November, and on into December, with one agent showing eighteen dates in the window to 26 December. Earlier autumn Saturdays — 12, 19 and 26 September, 3 and 17 October — have already been played and dropped off the live listings.

Distribution is unusually broad for an unsubsidised production: berlin.de's ticket shop, Classictic, GetYourGuide, getgo, Eventim-Light and the production's own site all sell the same Saturday, and visitBerlin carries it as a Top Event tagged for accessibility and for the Kurfürstendamm district. Pricing is tiered by table position, with a base around €222 at one agent, front-row categories above that, reduced children's tickets and optional unlimited-drinks packages.

Audience response so far is good but thin in volume, which is what a six-month-old show looks like: Classictic shows a 4.9 out of 5 rating, and the two main review platforms between them carry only a few dozen verdicts. The recurring points in them are the band rather than the backdrop, and the integration of the courses with the sets — one reviewer characterised the result as closer to a staged performance than to a concert.

In the room

There is no support act and no interval in the usual sense; the dinner service is the interval, three times over, which means the applause never fully dies and the room stays at conversation volume between sets. That is the trade the format makes. It also means the show has to win a crowd that is mid-meal, from a stage set into a hotel hall with no flying scenery, no screen and no production spectacle beyond lighting and the suits.

What the evening has instead is proximity. The hall seats an audience of a size where the rhythm section is audible unamplified, which is the argument for booking a quartet rather than a sixteen-piece band and then apologising for the room. The nearest tram of consequence is irrelevant here — the stop is Breitscheidplatz, a hundred metres away, with Zoologischer Garten four hundred metres on for the S3, S5, S7, S9, U2 and U9.