Like Sitting on a Back Porch Somewhere in the Heartland

Bet you didn’t know that the world’s largest ketchup bottle (a 170-foot-tall water tower) is in Collinsville, Ill., near St. Louis. Nor were you aware that it is the favorite roadside attraction of the Broadway tenor Jason Danieley.

Every theater star comes from somewhere, usually not New York. As a sideline to his theatrical career, Mr. Danieley, who grew up in St. Louis, channels his abiding affection for vintage heartland sounds into an acoustic band, the Frontier Heroes, that translates popular standards into a plain rural style he calls “back-porch Americana.” It is similar to what Willie Nelson does.

And on Monday evening Mr. Danieley and three of the band’s six members, Eric B. Davis, Michael Aarons and Christian Hebel, playing multiple string instruments, including banjo, fiddle, mandolin and guitar, gave the first of four performances at the Metropolitan Room. During the program, Mr. Danieley read each player’s selection of his favorite road trip, tourist attraction and roadside restaurant. Three of the four chose restaurants from the Cracker Barrel chain.

This contemporary folklore enhanced the flavor of music, which, depending on the choice of instrumentation, veered in style from Texas swing to bluegrass with echoes of Quintet of the Hot Club of France. If none of the band members, all of whom play in Broadway orchestra pits, demonstrated the virtuosity of today’s bluegrass and old-time music luminaries, they maintained an easygoing artistic camaraderie.

Mr. Danieley, a classically trained tenor, is not a vocal chameleon who with the snap of his fingers can turn into Bob Dylan. But when he softens his clenched, semioperatic declamation, his voice shades smoothly into a more relaxed country-folk crooning style, reminiscent at times of Loudon Wainwright III, but with less of a twang. Most important, his phrasing loosens up, and he begins to swing.

The program demonstrated what might be called the Willie Nelson principle: that most songs can be done in any style, given the appropriate arrangement and instrumentation. Even histrionic arias like the Mario Lanza hit “Be My Love” and the grand Broadway showstoppers “What Kind of Fool Am I?” and “As Long as She Needs Me” were successfully bent in humbler directions by being sped up, harmonically simplified and given a steady rhythmic lilt. Through it all, Mr. Danieley remained true to himself, standing confidently astride the distance between rural and urban, classical and folk.