O.C. Pop Music Review : Midler’s Spontaneous Combustion

IRVINE — In a concert season of tailored star vehicles, Bette Midler’s production, “Experience the Divine,” stands out for its sense of spontaneity.

Barbra Streisand presented a seamless, “Masterpiece Theatre” biopic, a self-celebratory ritual enacted with exacting taste upon an exquisite stage set complete with tea service.

Janet Jackson contrived an entertainment for the MTV generation, flashy, fast moving, big on mechanical wizardry, revealing of cleavage and bellybutton but drawing a blank when it came to fleshing out the person inside the flesh.

Midler’s concert, her first touring package since the early 1980s, was less a piece of modern entertainment machinery than a throwback to vaudeville--a more immediate, less distancing brand of performance.

It was, in fact, a highly crafted, well-rehearsed theatrical apparently little changed from the show she first took out a year ago. But Midler’s act made imbalance and jarring juxtaposition the rule and gave the impression that anything at all might pop out at any moment.

The formerly fleshy, formerly redheaded singer, now slimmed-down and topped by a pile-up of blond curls, aptly likened herself to a CD player set on “shuffle.”

Much of the pleasure of the two-hour, 15-minute show at Irvine Meadows stemmed from the surprising nature of what popped out.

Where else are you going to see mermaids making like Rockettes while riding in motorized wheelchairs, then dancing on fishtails-for-feet, as did Midler and her three singing sidekicks, the Harlettes?

*

What comedian is going to give you up-to-the-minute one-liner dispatches on (and dispatchings of) the latest celebrity doings (“CNN chasing DNA . . . figure skating as a contact sport”), but also incorporate a long re-creation of Sophie Tucker’s bawdy, burlesque-house comedy?

Who would dream of singing a witty, lightheartedly boastful rap number about herself, then zip right into a swinging, breezy Cole Porter song, “Miss Otis Regrets,” about a society lady’s lynching? Another sudden shift found Midler delivering a long stand-up comedy sequence, then turning without warning to an aching ballad.

Watching her, one thought of the days of vaudeville and TV variety shows, when the comedian preceded the torch singer, who was followed by the animal act and the ventriloquist, all linked by a single principle: the eagerness to entertain.

Tellingly, Midler did not employ the video screens used nowadays by most other big-ticket acts, but placed justified confidence in her ability to project a personality big enough to reach to the lawn (a sparsely populated lawn; Midler drew perhaps 11,000 fans to the 15,000-capacity amphitheater).

The show was full of gimmicks (including some cleverly risque body painting, as Midler decorated the torsos of female dancers clad only in G-strings and pasties), but it was refreshing that they were gimmicks of the traditional stage and not of the video age.

The show’s overall zestfulness made it possible to forgive this vision of the Divine when it erred. Despite its delightful bits, the mermaid routine, which has been in her act for years, went on far too long and was built around a pointless scenario in which Midler’s character, Delores DeLago, presided over the sort of self-help seminar seen on late-night, paid-programming TV.

The concert’s first half was strong on comedy and ended with Midler’s bang-up re-creation of “Rose’s Turn,” a show-stopper from the Broadway musical “Gypsy.” But it also was strewn with tossed-off ballads, including a pallid version of “The Rose” (Midler sang this weeper with a smile on her face, suggesting that she is either heartily sick of the song, or that she wasn’t joking when she talked about spending 20 years on Prozac).

After the mermaid epic that opened the second act, Midler stuck to some signature ballads. “Do You Want to Dance?” suffered without the sultry, dreamy intimacy she brought to the version on her career-launching album, “The Divine Miss M.”

Midler was effective when she could find a dramatic angle to emphasize, a character to play, as she did on “Hello in There,” a flinty John Prine lament depicting old age as the worn-out nub of life.

But her voice doesn’t have a rich blend of hues, and it sounded harsh as she proclaimed “From a Distance” or overdid the belting on “Stay With Me,” an anguished, R & B-flavored torch song from “The Rose.” Part of that harshness may have been in the sound mix, but it also had to do with the one-dimensional timbre of Midler’s voice.

Midler has updated some of the topical references in her show from when she first took it to the road last year. There were references to the Simpson and Harding-Kerrigan sagas, to the Jackson-Presley nuptials (“I’m worried about Lisa Marie Presley; I don’t think she knows why they call it Neverland”), and several quips and barbs about Orange County, where Midler, who owns a house in Laguna Beach, is a sometime resident.

Hip-shooting spontaneity has its risks. Some rather unfunny attempts at Jewish ethnic humor (she’s no Jackie Mason) led to the subject of the Streisand tour: “I wish I’d brought my carpet like that other Jewish girl singer.” To which somebody called out “princess,” a term now taken as a slur by most Jews. One of the Harlettes asked Midler who said it.

“Some racist I’m sure,” she answered. “You know how they are down here.” Midler quickly said she was joking, but good humor is specific, and there’s not much funny in broadly labeling a community as racist. Midler must have realized that, because a moment later, softening her typically sassy edge, she announced, “Orange County’s been very, very good to me.”

*

Midler will have a harder time making amends for her ticket prices. Face prices were $102.50 for orchestra, $52.50 for loge and $32.50 for terrace seating, for an average price of about $53.

She jokingly referred to the high-rollers down front as “Yuppie swine.” But charging an average of more than $50 a seat makes Midler (who probably grossed more than $500,000 for her evening’s work)--and the even more pricey Eagles and Barbra Streisand--the Marie Antoinettes of their generation.

Pop music has been a real part of America’s social glue, but overpriced concerts are becoming an exercise in class division. Fans of small or average means are either excluded or extorted.

From up close at $102.50, or from a distance at $32.50, inflated price structures are raw displays of unfettered ego that deny the populist ideal of classlessness proclaimed in Midler’s hit. A concert industry willing to play Marie Antoinette has already lost its head; if this keeps up, it deserves to lose its customers.