Wayne Newton performs Saturday at the Robins Theatre in Warren. (Submitted photo)

One of the greatest lessons Wayne Newton ever learned was a comment, thankfully, directed at someone else.

“I was having lunch with Frank Sinatra one day,” he said during a telephone interview from vacation home in Kalispell, Mont. “Another singer walked up, who will remain nameless for gentlemanly reasons, and he handed Frank his new album. He was very well known, a very big star.

“He said, ‘Boss, when you get a chance, listen to this and tell me what’s wrong with it.’ Frank didn’t even look up from his plate, and he said, ‘I can tell you what’s wrong with it without even hearing it.’ The other gentleman kind of gulped and said, ‘What is that?’ Frank said, ‘God gave you an incredible talent when he gave you your voice. Unfortunately it’s not connected to your heart.’

“It gave me a moment I’ve never forgotten. When I hear people sing on some of the talent shows today, they’re incredible vocalists, incredible singers, but they’re not singing from the heart. That in itself was one of the major things I learned.”

After more than 70 years in show business, more than 60 of them performing in Las Vegas, Newton has no shortage of stories. And his tales involve Sinatra and his Rat Pack cronies, billionaire recluse Howard Hughes (who owned some of the casinos where Newton performed) and television star Jackie Gleason, who told Newton after he performed a song with an abrupt ending on Gleason’s variety show, “‘Kid, when you end a song, let ’em know it’s over.’ And I’ve never done one of those quick endings again,” Newton said.

Newton will share some of the stories from his career and his songs when he brings his “Up Close & Personal” show to the Robins Theatre on Saturday. It’s a show he’s been doing for a couple of years.

“The owner of Bally’s at the time said, ‘You should really show some of the films of Vegas in the early days and the stuff you were doing in the early days. I said, ‘People aren’t interested in that stuff.’ He said, ‘You’d be surprised.’ So I decided to put together a show that was a bit of a retrospective but included all the music that historically people have let me know they want to hear. It’s been a tremendous success and a lot of fun to do.”

Newton went through old video clips of his past television performance and includes some of them in the show, but not too many, he promised.

“I tried to pick things that would be interesting to the crowd in addition to interesting to me,” he said.

Newton has done his share of touring, but he is synonymous with Las Vegas, which has evolved from a town known for $1.99 buffets and penny slots to a gambling, entertainment and culinary mecca that is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.

Dating back to his days as a teenager when Newton and his brothers were doing six shows a day in the late 1950s, he has performed more than 25,000 shows in Las Vegas for more than 40 million people, according to his bio.

In many ways, Newton is a precursor to the many performers who set up a home base in places like Vegas and Branson, Mo., having their fans travel to see them instead of hitting the road themselves. However, Newton didn’t stay in Vegas because he didn’t like traveling. He had bronchial asthma as a child, which originally inspired his family to move from Virginia to Phoenix. The family also lived in Newark for a year when Newton was in sixth grade because his father had trouble finding work in Phoenix.

“I got sick again and we went back (to Phoenix),” Newton said. “When I went from Phoenix to Vegas, it was the same kind of weather. It was good to me there. I simply stayed because I didn’t want to travel and go though all the weather changes and that kind of thing. Thank God, I was healed from it, I don’t have that problem anymore. I never thought of myself as having stayed in Vegas for any other reason than it was a job and I felt good doing it.”

For decades he was the city’s most recognizable ambassador. If a movie was shot there or a television series decided to shoot an episode in “Sin City,” there’s a good chance Newton at least made a cameo appearance. His IMDb page includes such films as “Vegas Vacation,” “Ocean’s Eleven” and the James Bond film “License to Kill” as well as the TV shows “Roseanne,” “Full House,” “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and, of course, “Vega$” (the one starring Robert Urich) and “Las Vegas” (the one starring James Caan).

He’s one of only two people to receive Las Vegas’ Medal of Honor and was named one of the state’s “Top Three Entertainers of the Century” alongside Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. He received the first star on the Las Vegas Walk of Fame, and he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as well.

Considering his list of accolades, it’s not surprising that Newton said the only thing on his bucket list is to keep doing what he’s been doing for as long as he can.

“The reason I started in show business, my parents took me to see a Grand Ole Opry show in Virginia,” he said. “We were way up in the balcony, so far back I couldn’t see the performers on stage. I could just listen. I found myself looking around at the audiences’ faces. I saw the joy this music was bringing those people, and I said to my mother, ‘That’s what I want to do.’

“That never changed. I just try to bring some happiness into people’s lives and therefore from that I’m happy. I want to continue what I’ve been doing until people are tired of me, then I’ll figure out something else.”

If you go …

WHO: Wayne Newton

WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday

WHERE: Robins Theatre, 160 E. Market St., Warren

HOW MUCH: Tickets range from $30 to $99. robinstheatre.com