On the final night of a Caribbean cruise in March, the Regal Princess is charging home from Cozumel to Fort Lauderdale and the ship’s three-story atrium is thrumming with energy. The night before, a voting ballot was left on each passenger’s pillow, next to a red-foiled chocolate. Now it feels like all 4,109 of us—almost twice the number on the Titanic—are here, spilling over spiral staircases and brass railings. Babies in strollers loll next to seniors in wheelchairs. A netted balloon drop bulges expectantly overhead. A full band and eighteen dancers from the ship’s Broadway-style show vogue and vamp, juicing up the crowd.
The tuxedoed cruise director struts in like a boxing emcee. “You’ve been seeing them allllll week,” he booms, clutching an envelope. “Now let’s welcome back our four nomineeees!”
The passengers cheer as four of the world’s best cruise entertainers walk into the glare of a spotlight: British singer-comedian Jo Little sparkles like a disco ball in a glitzy red dress. Dapper quartet The Modern Gentlemen, who spent the last fourteen years crooning behind Frankie Valli, wink at the crowd, making the golden girls scream. Acrobatic piano man Tom Franek, wearing a near-bioluminescent pink suit, pulls grins so rubbery he seems Pixar-animated. Finally, the steely illusionist Michael Barron glides in serenely, as if he already knows whose name is inside the cruise director’s envelope.
Then there’s a hush. The splendidly named cruise director, Dan Falconer, milks the moment. Turning and turning to face the passengers, Falconer fakes once, twice, then booms, “The winner of the 2018 Entertainer of the Year is…”
I cannot hear Falconer. Things fall apart. The balloon net cannot hold. A bright, bouncing tide of latex is loosed upon the crowd. The ceremony is drowned in cheers. A revelation is at hand, as two glammed-up showgirls produce an oversized foam-board check, made out for a grand-prize total of five…thousand…dollars.
Okay, so this isn’t the Oscars—but it’s as close as you get in international waters. And this competition matters to these performers, several of whom have complained to me privately of stress headaches and sleepless nights. They’ve hustled for years just to get here, playing kids’ birthday parties, amusement parks, piano lounges, bars, ice-skating rinks, college cafeterias, casinos, Chippendales lineups, Spanish bullfighting rings, and retirement villages. But when the balloons clear, only one act will leave as Entertainer of the Year, the cruise entertainment industry’s highest—and only—honor.
cappella.
Acrobat, aerial.
Acrobat, BMX/unicycle.
Acrobat, duo.
Acrobat, family act…”
On the first day of the weeklong Entertainer of the Year cruise, I meet its creator, Princess Cruises guest entertainment manager Phil Kaler, in his tiny, windowless cabin. A fit, crew-cut sixty-three-year-old who looks forty-five, Kaler reads from his laptop’s alphabetically sorted database: “Comedy, guitarist. Comedy, hypnotist. Comedy, vocal entertainer...”
As he moves from categories to specific names, I realize I’ve never heard of any of them, despite my twenty years of working as an entertainment journalist and critic. To use a nautical cliché, the stars most of us can name are just the tip of the entertainment-economy iceberg. Writers like me tend to cover the top 1 percent of performers, those who emerge from a sea of talent to peak on magazine covers or talk-show couches or awards stages—and usually not for long.
I’m on my first-ever cruise because I wanted to see how the entertainment world’s 99 percent, as Bernie Sanders might say, work for a living. The comedians who don’t film HBO specials; the magicians who aren’t David Blaine; the variety acts who don’t just disappear after their fifteen seconds on America’s Got Talent. These entertainers are struggling to compete with everything from YouTube phenoms to Netflix and Spotify. In Vegas and Times Square, small clubs and homegrown acts are getting squeezed out by arenas, superstars, and global brands, like mom-and-pop shops bulldozed by Walmarts.
But maybe smaller acts aren’t dying. Maybe they’ve just gone on vacation, since cruises need entertainers now more than ever. The $38 billion cruise industry has boomed with Boomers, growing from 17.8 million passengers in 2010 to 25.8 million passengers in 2017. The Regal Princess is one of more than four hundred fifty active cruise ships, and each is a floating entertainment district. It typically employs a six-piece party band; a seven-piece house band; a jazz quintet; a DJ; a piano-bar lounge singer; and seventeen singer-dancers who rotate through stage shows, including two created exclusively for Princess by Wicked’s Stephen Schwartz. (Other lines feature partnerships with outfits like Cirque du Soleil, Second City, and Blue Note Records.) Last year, Kaler and his team booked four hundred sixty-eight different headliners, from “a cappella” to “xylophonist.”
“How can you please all 4,100 passengers?” Kaler asks, as he unfurls massive spreadsheets that map out his bookings across all eighteen ships. “You can’t. You give them variety.”
After forty years in show business, Kaler understands why “cruise entertainer” is Simon Cowell’s go-to Idol insult. He’s seen offensive comedians and karaoke-quality singers. He’s heard “Sweet Caroline” sing-alongs more times than any human should have to endure. He’s seen cruise life turn entertainers into drunks and gamblers.
But Kaler has seen terrific shows, too. So, seven years ago, he created the Entertainer of the Year competition to reward the ones who bring, he says, “a real legitimacy to cruise entertainment.” Since passengers rate everything at the end of their cruises, acts who receive five-out-of-tens never get asked back. But the absolute highest-rated acts—nines and tens—get considered for Entertainer of the Year. The nomination is itself a reward: Nominees get raises, more gigs, and this celebratory cruise week with deeply discounted rates for friends and family. But only the winner gets the five-thousand-dollar check and the real prestige that can lead to more work.
For headliners, Kaler usually pays acts twenty-five hundred to three thousand dollars per person—up to four thousand dollars for top acts—plus room and board, for a few shows performed during a weeklong cruise. “We have acts who make six figures and work all year round,” he says. At best, it can feel like theater camp, with countless perks: Entertainers can hit the pool, gym, all-you-can-eat buffets, and dirt-cheap crew bars; they can explore the globe and the active hookup scene between entertainers and stewards. At worst, it’s a monotonous tour of duty.
“You’re away from your family, sometimes traveling thirty hours to get to a gig,” Kaler says. “It’s hell, man. So you’ve got to love what you do.”
Kaler grew up in conservative 1950s Indiana as a “closeted dancer,” he says, dreaming of Broadway. He never made it to the Great White Way, but for twenty-five years he toured the world with his comedy-skit trio, Shenanigans, from the borscht belt clubs and the Dirty Dancing resorts to European cruises. At sea, he found both a career and a kind of floating family. He tells me about a night in 1984, when he was twenty-eight. “Our manager, Frosty, was the only one who knew I was gay,” Kaler says. Frosty introduced Kaler to another male dancer he knew Kaler was crushing on, toasting the duo to “just be happy," mere hours before dying of a heart attack on the ship’s dance floor.
Now Kaler sees himself as a similar kind of father figure to the acts he calls “my kids,” while they work the modern equivalent of the circuit he used to hustle: cruises, hotels, colleges, retirement homes, casinos, and local theaters.
“That’s why Entertainer of the Year is hard,” he sighs, rubbing his buzzcut. “I don’t want anyone to lose.”
Later that day, I get lost a few times in the ship’s seventeen-deck stairways, then arrive at the surprisingly deluxe Princess Theater just in time to see nominee Jo Little flip-flop her way into the sound booth and go full diva.
“Where’s me pyro?” the four-foot-ten comedian mock-complains in her heavy Yorkshire accent. “Celine Dion won’t get onstage without pyro and I won’t either! Come on! I’m an Entertainer of the Year nominee!”
A stage manager informs Little that there will be no pyrotechnic effects onboard. It’s a fire hazard.
“Well, can I at least have ice?” Little says.
“Ice?” the stage manager says. “Sure, we can get you a bucket of ice, Jo. I’ll call room service…”
Pyro is low on Little’s list of concerns anyway: On the eve of the biggest performance of her life, she says, “The airline lost all me luggage.” Luckily, as her own director, manager, and stylist, she always keeps two self-bedazzled stage costumes in her carry-on. Now she’s ready to rehearse with the house band in front of a floor-to-ceiling LED backdrop and 985 plush seats.
“What I love is, you get on a cruise and you know you’re going to have a captive audience,” Little says. “A thousand people in a theater! You try doing that in a comedy club. It’s a tough business. And try selling out an arena! You’ve got to be Bette Midler.”
Little never expected to make it big like Midler. She says getting paid to sing “The Rose” more than the Divine Miss M herself—working nearly three hundred days a year, the industry’s legal max—is “beyond my wildest dreams.”
Kaler called her with the good news of her nomination as she was boarding a ship in Sydney. “I just dropped everything—my rucksack, my jacket—and danced on my suitcase!” Little says. “I called my family. Everyone was cheering. To be recognized for your passion? It was one of the big moments of my life.”
Little was born special, as “one of the first test-tube babies,” she says, and “probably shook up too many times.” As a child, she became a tae kwon do champion, before severe scoliosis led to repeated back surgeries, metal bolt implants, and the inability to resist making jokes like “I’ve got a screw loose.” Comedy became her way of making sure “people were laughing at what I was saying, not what I looked like. They used to have people like me in the circus.”
Little essentially ran off to the circus on her own terms. Belting ballads and slinging zingers like her hero, Joan Rivers, she turned her short height into a marketing pitch: “Jo Little: small in stature, big in personality, and huge in talent!” After hustling at kids' parties, amusement parks, and pubs, she tired of playing to the “rough-and-ready lads” in drunken workingmen’s clubs. So when a talent agent offered her steady work at sea, she set sail.
Monday night, Little takes the Princess Theater stage wearing a quantity of crystals typically reserved for New Year’s Eve ball drops. Accustomed to working European and Australian cruises, and anxious to charm these North Americans, she launches into the WWII standard “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” hamming it up with the house-band trumpet player. She’s met with polite applause: Even for this older crowd, the tune is ancient. So she switches to comedy, working hard and fast to win fans with a rim-shot drumroll of jokes about the Home Shopping Network, menopause, plastic surgery, dieting, the cruise buffet, the cruise toilets, her husband and child (she has neither), and her height. Little—who later tells me she wants to “give people the Ha ha and the Oh, wow!”—belts out big-voiced, lovely ballads while unloading bags of gags, from jokey PowerPoint slides and her LED-lit dress to her bedazzled Spanx.
The show is a little corny and familiar; compared to stand-up by anyone but, say, Jay Leno, her set is shockingly tame. But these families and retirees didn’t pay to be challenged or provoked—much less insulted or offended. Dirty jokes and politics are for “land gigs.” (Someone like Amy Schumer would be thrown overboard.) Here, acts are also amenities, performing at the intersection of entertainment and hospitality, for crowds ranging in age from nine months to ninety-nine. They aren’t paid to push the line; they’re paid to serve. A cruise entertainer’s job is to help the passengers just be happy.
“And what’s the point of doing politics here?” says Little, who doesn’t like “crude and rude” comedy anyway. “Why do you want to talk about that on vacation?”
Over the week, some passengers will complain that even Little’s menopause jokes were too raunchy, but most just praise how she “gave it her all”—like they’re tipping for extra effort. She’ll take that, she says. “I always give it 200 percent, even when I’m seasick and can’t stand up,” Little says. In return, she says, tearing up, she gets “everything I wanted: just to entertain.”
On the second day, passengers spend their sunlit hours snorkeling and slurping rum punch in Jamaica, but by 8 p.m., the crowd in the Princess Theater is dressed in suits, tuxedos, and fancy dresses. It’s one of the week’s two Formal Nights, a perfect match for The Modern Gentlemen, who always perform in black tie.
At sea, every band is a cover band. There are no original songs. Since the average age of passengers on this Princess cruise is sixty-three, the tunes of the '60s and '70s provide the backbeat. So the handsome, stubbled Modern Gentlemen—brothers Brian and Brandon Brigham, Todd Fournier, and the aptly named Landon Beard—get right to it, blasting through expert takes on The Four Tops’ “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” and The Spinners’ “Working My Way Back to You,” while synchronizing boy-band hands and shoobie-doo side steps. The crowd goes wild. (“If you’ve got tennis balls on your walker,” Beard will tell me later, “we are your guys.”)
On land, touring is part of a band’s ongoing relationship with fans. But here each gig is a first date. The audience bought tickets to see the Caribbean, not The Modern Gentlemen. If the guys want to win the competition, they’ll have to work fast to ingratiate themselves.
“Hey, I heard there’s a wedding onboard today?” one of the four Gentlemen calls out. “Is that Ellie and John over there? We’re your wedding band!”
The actually blushing bride and her wedding party take a bow. Then the Gentlemen introduce themselves with comic bits before launching into an a cappella number—a tribute to how they met in 2001, while singing at Disney’s California Adventure Park. Back then, they were all working odd jobs, from bagging groceries to gigging in plays, soap operas, and Beetlejuice's Graveyard Revue at Universal Studios. That all changed when Frankie Valli hired them in 2003 to sing with him.
“Frankie was like a dad to us,” Brian says. The doo-wop star was on the downslope of fame when they met; then Jersey Boys exploded, and they rode his comeback wave from the ice-skating rinks of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons: Tribute on Ice up to the stage of London’s Royal Albert Hall. Now, the guys tell the crowd, they’re one of the only acts that can say they’ve shared bills with the legends they cover: the Beach Boys, Tony Bennett, and the Platters.
The Gentlemen expertly segue from doo-wop to Motown and back, as couples squeeze hands and sing along. They cap their tight set with The Four Seasons’ most literally nostalgic song: “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night).”
Amid a standing ovation and much elderly smooching, Landon gets stuck behind an older passenger’s motorized scooter on his way out. The emcee signs off: “Don’t forget it’s seniors night at the casino! Three prunes in a row, then it’s straight to the craps table!”
Later, I ask the guys how they feel about playing golden oldies for an older crowd. They say they love the music, the audience response, the lifestyle. “Most bands go on tour, but not to, like, beautiful beaches,” says Landon, shrugging. “We’ve been really fortunate not to have to live out of a van.”
But their aging demographic is part of why they split with Frankie Valli, just a few weeks before the trip. “Frankie’s eighty-three,” Beard says. “We had to take the leap.” They’re hoping an Entertainer of the Year win might kick-start their next phase. “We love doo-wop, but everything has a shelf life,” Brandon says. “Now we do '60s and '70s. Do we start doing '70s and '80s? I don’t know.”
In the lobby after the show, the guys gamely sign CDs of their Sinatra cover album, speak up loudly for hard-of-hearing guests, and ham it up for duck-face selfies with teenage grandchildren. A half-dozen passengers tell me they can’t believe they got to meet the guys—“They’re gentlemen, just like Frankie!” one says—while some get misty, telling me how the music reminded them of their first dates, first concerts, and first marriages.
“Part of the job happens after that first show, when everyone knows you,” Brian says, a couple of days later, after spending a day swimming with stingrays in the Cayman Islands with passengers. “You have to enjoy being on the ship with everyone. Because you can’t go anywhere else.”
As the ship sails away from Jamaica toward Grand Cayman on Wednesday afternoon, I meet Tom Franek, a lanky Minnesotan with hair gelled so high it looks like he’s been electrocuted in the top deck’s Jacuzzi. We grab a table at Crooners piano lounge on Deck 7, a deck above the casino bar, two decks above Vines wine bar, and nine decks below Mermaids Tail margarita bar, which is two decks above the wedding chapel that hosts meetings for Alcoholics Anonymous.
I order an old-fashioned, to get the most out of my unlimited top-shelf drinks package. Franek, whose tight T-shirt reveals a lean, muscular physique molded in the ship’s gym, sticks with water. “I quit drinking because I wanted to be sharp for this competition,” he says, in his upbeat, Fargo-thick accent.
Franek graduated from his hometown college, St. Olaf, with a music degree that qualified him to play “Hey Ya!” six times a day in a local theme park revue called Hit Mix 2006. Then a jazz professor introduced him to cruises, and over the last twelve years, Franek has worked his way up the aquatic-piano-player food chain. His first gig was playing piano in the house band on this very ship’s inaugural voyage. (He saw six cast members from the original Love Boat christen it with Champagne.) He earned about twenty-five hundred dollars a month—less than his weekly rate now—playing shows all day, then sleeping in a shared, windowless room.
Next, he hustled his way into a piano-man gig at the Princess Lodge resort in Denali, Alaska. “I had a month to learn maybe one hundred twenty songs and started with ‘Piano Man,’” he says of the Billy Joel classic that, depending on whom you ask, is either a timeless ode to lounges like the one we’re sitting in or a syrupy abomination. (Franek loves it.)
He never had a burning desire to write his own music, and loved playing in that Alaskan piano bar, where vacationers requested “Sweet Caroline” and “My Way” night after night. “I became the jukebox,” he says. “They tell you what they want. Over time, you become a mirror of their desires.”
But an entertainer is not just a jukebox, and after a manager reprimanded him—“We’re paying you to entertain, not just play some songs”—Franek upped his game, memorizing jokes from Prairie Home Companion that suited his midwestern demeanor. He studied the showmanship of Jerry Lee Lewis and Liberace, whom he describes reverentially, and started wearing his now-signature wild-and-crazy-guy suits.
After nine years of playing “Piano Man” virtually every night, “I turned thirty,” he says, “and thought, Holy crap, I’ve gotta do something with myself.” Becoming a headlining act was the next step. So Franek took everything he’d learned and cooked up a forty-five-minute show of piano medleys, jokes, gags, acrobatic stunts, and everyone’s favorite songs. He taped his performances with two cameras: one focused on him, the other on the guests. “I would watch them watch my show,” he says, and then cut what they didn’t like.
On Wednesday night, Franek charges into the Princess Theater through the back entrance, wearing blue snakeskin shoes and a bright pink suit, singing a loud version of the shouty polka “Roll Out the Barrel.” I’m taken aback to find that the audience—heavily midwestern and mostly white—eats it up. But I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised; “Roll Out the Barrel” was a standard of Franek’s hero, the Wisconsin-born Liberace.
As the burlesque dancers in Gypsy sang, the first rule of showbiz is, "you gotta get a gimmick." To be safe, Franek has a dozen: He straps LED lights to his fingers and plays fast in the dark. He covers Elvis, Phantom of the Opera, and more Liberace, while occasionally leaping off the stage to interact with (and hug) fans. He plays the piano behind his back, with a hand towel over his face, while lying on the piano top, and between his legs and upside down while lying on the floor. He does leaping cheerleader toe-touches. At one point, he explains how he went deaf in his left ear while flying home from a childhood choir competition, in the hope that his persistence might inspire cruisers to “achieve or accomplish whatever you’re hoping to do.”
Then he unleashes the showstopper. “I’ve been working on a new piano stunt,” he says. “If it doesn’t work out, don’t post it on the Internet or nothin’.” Franek flips into a headstand—feet on the piano top, head by the pedals—and keeps playing. The crowd hoots like he’s turned water into piña colada. Dripping sweat, he signs off with an ancient heartland capper: “If I don’t see you in the future, I’ll see you in the pasture.”
After the show, a middle-aged Spanish couple tells me that they’ve been following Franek since his piano-lounge days in Alaska, and booked this cruise just to see him. A woman with a deaf sister cries, saying she found Franek’s journey inspiring.
William Smiddy, a gruff passenger who recently suffered a stroke, says he sees variety acts all the time at his Florida retirement community. “I only like the top entertainment,” he says, sipping a vodka. “My wife, she’s bullshit easy to please…”
“It’s true,” agrees his wife, Helene Zegarelli. “I always love everything!”
“But this guy,” says Smiddy, “is really, really good."
On Thursday, the illusionist Michael Barron and I walk the seemingly endless, serpentine buffet lines, while he tells me that he was so obsessed with Superman during his South Florida childhood that “I wore Superman costumes everywhere,” he says. “I had multiples, in case one was dirty.”
At seven, Barron got to see a real man fly: His father took him to see David Copperfield perform his famous flying illusion, and Barron immediately knew what he wanted to do with his life. At age eleven, he posted his first ad in the phone book: “Magic by Mike.” By fourteen, Florida state magic-competition judges moved him to the adult category—“Feathers were ruffled,” he says, grinning—where he placed second.
Like his Entertainer of the Year nominee counterparts, Barron started small, with "birthday parties, nursing homes, Boy Scout meetings, and banquets...whatever you can get," he says. The greatest trick of all is to avoid ending up "at Pizza Hut, wearing a fanny pack full of balloons and a button that says, 'Tipping is not a city in China.'"
After hustling his way into corporate events and college gigs, he had his big break: creating illusions for Mickey’s Magic Show, an arena spectacle he performed thousands of times in fourteen languages. When Barron toured colleges, he was going for a “rock-and-roll thing,” but now he aims for something “more timeless” that can appeal to anyone, “like Justin Timberlake, if he did a magic show: likable and classy.” He just wrapped a six-month residency at a mega-casino in Macau, where he started selling his unique tricks to other magicians via smartphone apps.
At the Princess Theater, he’s a smooth performer in a bespoke suit. He puts his own spin on a disappearing-ring trick by staging it with Cajun voodoo dolls. He turns a classic scarf act upside down, by standing on a panel of micro air jets of his invention, which shoot the scarves upward, like flickering flames.
By the time he’s done, he’s chopped two dancers in half, staged a beautiful illusion with flying origami, and performed “an ancient illusion involving water and sand. I call it water…and sand.” The elegant show is flawless and wins warm—though not ecstatic—applause. “He was good, but I’ve seen a lot of those tricks before,” a fan tells me.
Later, at the terrace bar on the ship’s stern, he laughs. “Every time I pull out a deck of cards, before I even do anything, someone says, ‘I’ve seen that before,’” he says. “And I’m like, ‘No. You haven’t.’”
Very few magicians become household names, and Barron, as good as he is, has accepted that he will likely never become as huge as Copperfield. “To not be happy with this is missing the point, because the math of becoming that kind of star is just astronomically against you,” he says.
For that matter, Barron tells me something none of the other contestants do: He doesn’t really care about winning Entertainer of the Year. “I work, like, forty-five days a year doing what I love and I make six figures,” he says. “That’s the goal—not this prize. A five-thousand-dollar check? That’s one contract. I’m not going to go around the ship, peddling for votes.”
It’s the final night before voting, and Michael Barron is not peddling for votes, but Jo Little has spent the whole day hustling her heart out. I meet her at Crooners Lounge, where she’s sitting with an old friend and feeling melancholic.
“You can only get nominated once your whole career,” she says, glumly. “So, this is it.” She’s been having trouble sleeping and eating. “I’ve never been so nervous. My mouth is dry. Do you have any spit I can borrow?”
Across the room, Liam Stewart, tonight’s piano man, calls out, “Who are you all voting for tomorrow?”
Little gets a big cheer—but so do the other nominees. Hoping to rally more votes, she stands next to the piano and sings Carole King’s neediest song: “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”
Her strong voice draws a crowd, and, soon the lounge is nearly full. But, right before she finishes, Tom Franek and his family walk in, unwittingly stepping on her moment. “Now we’ve got some competition!” Stewart calls out. “Tom, get up here!”
With very little protest, Franek returns to his old piano. “So, uh, you guys like ‘Piano Man’?” He pivots his hips to face the clientele instead of the piano, and works in the names of a few guests and the bartender (“Now Arturo at the bar is a friend of mine…”). Soon the whole lounge is happily singing along. When Franek's done, Stewart reclaims his piano with a huff and rolls his eyes: “Piano Man,” he scoffs. “Well, obviously…”
A while later, a mother pushes her teenaged son to the piano. He plays a classical piece beautifully, head over keys, lost in reverie. At first, everyone marvels at his talent and technique—but the longer he plays, the more guests drift away and call it a night. By the time the teen looks up, there’s hardly anyone left.
The kid is a wonderful pianist. But he’s a pathetic cruise entertainer.
Before he reveals the winner, Phil Kaler tells me that the voting was so close, they had to have a recount. But when the Entertainer of the Year is announced and a thousand bright, bouncing balloons fall down upon us, I see the winner I’d expected, grinning next to that oversized check.
Jo Little wanted it the most. The Modern Gentlemen were the best musicians. Michael Barron was the most artful and sophisticated performer. But Tom Franek was quite literally made for this. From house bands to piano bars to the main stage, this landlocked Minnesotan piano man evolved, like some Darwinian vaudevillian, to conquer the sea.
As kids pop balloons and cameras flash, Franek holds the trophy in one hand and his mother in the other, tears welling up in his eyes. His father, a mustachioed volunteer firefighter prone to phrases like “cute as a bug’s ear,” boasts proudly, “He worked so hard for this.”
The other nominees all hug Franek, as passengers ask for autographs and selfies—so many, that, after an hour, we have to escape back to my cabin for a quiet post-championship interview. “They have balloon drops on every cruise,” he says, savoring the moment, “but this one was for me.”
He didn’t expect to cry, but he did, he says, because he suspects his parents “had their doubts” about the fact that he wouldn’t give up on his dream. To most people, “it’s either Beyoncé or nothing,” he says, “and now I’m definitely making a good living. It took me a long time to get to say that.”
Franek turns surprisingly philosophical about his win. "If this had been called Talent of the Year—if it was about sheer talent, and not about entertaining and likability—it would be different," he says. Cruise entertainment, he says, "boils down to an ability to connect"—whether that's music, comedy, or magic. "Pianos have been around for centuries; it's really difficult to take something that ancient and make it feel fresh and new. I tried to make piano as entertaining as it can be. That's our responsibility—to make them laugh, to make them feel something."
Then he lets himself get a little drunk on dreams. Lately, his YouTube covers of the Internet’s most popular bands—Ed Sheeran, Adele, Bieber—have racked up more than a million views. If he could do anything, he says, maybe he’d like to be a musician on a late-night show. Or a star pianist “like an Elton John or Billy Joel or Yanni or even the Piano Guys.”
But a cruise isn’t a bad place for a piano man. Franek gets paid to do what he loves; plus, there’s an unlimited buffet, a gym, a free room in paradise with no roommates, everything but—“Oh, nice!” Franek says, surprised by my cabin’s moonlit view. “You’ve got a window!”
