Music Reviews

Sep 5, 1999 - The Angelic Sarah Brightman's Ostentatious Night at Lawlor

By Jack Neal

Money, lots of it, drives the sweet and talented Sarah Brightman to please audiences by lavishing enormous amounts of resources on her heavily produced show, "One Night in Eden." An entertainer who wants to please and backs up those desires with cash, is hard to criticize, but when the money is so misspent and so damaging to an entertainer's effectiveness as an artist, well - that's another matter.

Over 4000 fans of Brightman's New Age approach to semi-operatic, pops concertizing adored the star's nearly 90 minute concert (plus a 30-minute intermission) at Lawlor Event Center Saturday night (9/4/99) by responding with shouts of bravo, whistles and standing ovations that surely must have indicated to the star that she was doing something right. That reaction, in addition to making millions on albums, in the concert hall and as a star of stage musicals, undoubtedly will deflect any sage advice a critic from the provinces might offer. But nonetheless that offer is being made.

Sound levels for the Brightman concert were inexcusably and vulgarly loud. Miss Brightman's angelic voice became a monstrous assault on the ears that in a more enlightened age will be viewed as as damaging to health as smoking is today. The cavernous surroundings of Lawlor demand some type of amplification, but the distortion of Brightman's pure, if somewhat brittle, lyric soprano was shocking to both sensibilities and eardrums. Almost as damning, I'm certain it's exactly what she wanted. No sound engineer should take the fall for Brightman's demands. I moved from fourth row center, to the very last row of Lawlor, then to the outer-arena concourse with the doors closed. There, at last, a tolerable sound level for listening.

Liza Minnelli may have been the first entertainer to so heavily encumber herself with singing eight Broadway performances a week in a show ("The Act") in which she sang virtually every song, that pre-recording, then lipsyncing became a necessity for vocal survival (unfairly, to unsuspecting fans believing they were hearing the real thing). Hence the advent of canned live performances. Miss Brightman raised the fakery of lipsyncing to a new level with Saturday's concert, when a good portion of the program was lipsynced and not sung live at all. The Brightman orchestra's conductor (Mathew Scrivener), whose baton technique was the choppiest and strangest I've seen since junior high, wasn't so much conducting as checking monitors to see when he should signal the live on-stage musicians to cut off so as not to destroy the illusion that all was live.

The production's use of six boy dancers was the evening's ultimate coup de grace. Giggles greeted the bird chirping as these six supposedly British hunks dressed in gold lame monks' robes entered the stage carrying some kind of ritualistic flame. That's before the gigglers realized this was serious business and that they shouldn't embarrass the diva by laughing at her schoolgirl notions of what a real concert should be. But, what the hell! It was billed as "One Night in Eden," so why not show a little flesh and have some fun? The gold lame robes were soon discarded revealing shirtless young men with fairly good bodies in what one might call the Brightman show's half-monty look. One can only imagine what Carol Burnett might do parodying such ludicrous staging. It would be as hilarious as it was watching these six young men in various stages of acrobatics (horrid choreography by Michael Bergese), violin playing, hints of orgy ("Don't start without me," Mae West used to admonish her boys) and otherwise idolatry posturing hovering in front of and around the star. These chaps actually picked Brightman up and carried her about like some stiff Egyptian mummy; visions of Burnett creating her return to the stage of the world's oldest ballerina.

There's more.

The sameness of the evening's programming was astonishing. No sense of pace, no change of pace; just lethargic music making of lush, mushy funereal sounds set amidst a swirl of fabric, see-through scrims, flying torsos, body motions of flailing arms, body hugs and upside down young men that Brightman and company see as high art.

Camp is not dead.

Billed as music and lyrics by Puccini (Puccini wrote music, others wrote his librettos, i.e. lyrics, but that's a minor point amongst so much over-the-top camp) the exquisite "Nessan Dorma" from Puccini's "Turandot" was given that special Brightman treatment. As the audience waited in hushed expectancy (one has to admire a production that halts dead in the water waiting on changes), Brightman's six half montie's wheeled a flight of golden stairs to center stage (much like the old days, when air travelers used stairs to board planes), attached yards of parachute type fabric to the star's body and launched her heavenward, where she dramatically turned stage front, twenty feet of parachute train in place, to face her public. Then, set against a starry sky sporting an all-too-full moon, Brightman sang "Nessan Dorma" ("None shall sleep tonight"), one of the most cherished tenor arias in the operatic repertory, accompanied by the massive sounds of her mostly fake orchestra (syncing to recorded symphonic sounds), followed by a roaring ovation from fans.

End of part one.

Part two was more of the same. A grinding sound was heard as a ship's deck was lowered into place so that the star could do her sea sequence - "Dive," "La Mer," "Titanic," "Only an Ocean Away" - from a properly massive on-board perspective. It was impressive, and - worth waiting for. As were Patrick Woodroffe's lighting designs for this sequence, which were lovely (as were his designs all concert long). Then it was on to music from "Phantom," "written by Andrew Lloyd Webber," the star told us, "especially for me." It was that kind of modest event with Miss Brightman giving her kind of modest performances.

As a curtain call, "Don't Cry for me Argentina" was one of the evening's nicer, less pretentious presentations. Then it was back to a rumbling, overly hyped "Time to say Good-by" and the star was gone. "The song has ended," the old lyric tells us, "but the memory lingers on." Oh, how different memories will be for those remembering Saturday's massive encounters of the Sarah Brightman kind.