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John
Wendeborn: The Oregonian Staff
Paramount Theatre - Portland, OR
If there's a more outrageous show on the road than Bette Midler's, then lots of luck finding it. In the meantime, she's doing one more performance Thursday at the Paramount Theatre, and that's where the action will be.
Midler opened her two-night engagement here Wednesday with a sellout audience of obvious fans on hand to greet her with more standing ovations than a military pass in review. If that sounds a bit much, remember that Midler is too much herself, a petite tribute to tacky, trashy entertainment who needles anything that comes to her mind.
The show was in two sets, each 90 minutes long. It wasted no time establishing a theme. From the first song, Midler and her Harlettes, three women in classical ballet-type outfits, made suggestive humor the raison d'
etre. The opener was a white version of Tina Turner and the Ikettes but nevertheless an upbeat, energetic way of getting it started.
Midler talks about as much as she sings, and she handles both media supremely well. She adlibbed with the audience frequently and early on dodged everything from single roses to bouquets to a rubber chicken to a T-shirt from a Portland bar.
After some lines about "Margaret" Schwab (of course, that's Mildred), Midler launched into a tune called "Don't Look Down," getting some lines off about Queen Elizabeth, among others. Looking over the audience, she said at the end of the tune, "You're the first humanoids to see this show. And what a hip crowd; no blue hairs out there?"
Midler may be funny most of the time, but when she settles down to sing, especially ballads, she exhibits a truly emotional voice. Accompanied frequently on ballads by piano and a flowing, romantic synthesizer, the tunes were as much a highlight of the show as the humor.
There were some rockers, too, although nothing that would take your mind off someone like the Rolling Stones, although she did do a Latin, pop treatment of "Beast of Burden."
She also discussed aerobic exercise and Jazzercise and then made a few jokes about herpes, remarking once, "You always herp the one you love." Through out, her language onstage was appropriately trashy, no doubt adding to the enjoyment of this very adult show for the crowd.
The second half of the show began with the announcer introducing entertainment from a new Portland club, the Rajneesh, due for downtown soon, showing again her off the-wall idea of topical humor
But the true spirit of Midler came in the opening part of the segment as she and the Harlettes rolled out in motorized wheelchairs to sing "We Are Family" while dressed in mermaid outfits. Nothing later would top that bit, which included a lot of wheelchair choreography and even a mini-Busby Berkeley piece.
Midler and her singers also did "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," another crowd favorite, and worked more ballads and some up-tempo numbers into the second half. Her "My Mother's Eyes" was a tender look at the non-humorous side of the singer. Earlier, the quartet (backed by a fine six-piece band) did a dancing and singing number about large female breasts with hand puppets and balloons accentuating the bit.
Some 200 tickets remain on sale for the Thursday show, according to producers. It's a show worth seeing.
Patrick MacDonald: Times staff critic
Paramount Theatre - Seattle, WA
"Aaaarrrgh," she screamed. "All new songs. New props. New band. Ooolld girls."
There was no mistaking it; it was Bette Midler on the line, doing her patented Divine shtick and ballyhooing her new tour, which plays at 8 p.m. today and tomorrow at the Paramount.
"Actually there are five old songs and three old Harlettes, but all the rest is new," she went on, speaking from a rehearsal hall in Los Angeles. "There are tons of props. It's Prop City. And I've culled ideas from performers long gone, old ideas that are like standards nobody does anymore just fun things, silly things that are in such terrible taste everybody will groan and say, "I can't believe she's foisting that on us'."
Seattle will be first city on the new tour, which will play the West Coast and the South before settling in for several weeks at Radio City Music Hall in New York.
"I'm starting In Seattle because it's good luck," she said. "We had a fabulous time the last time we were there. It's in my book ("A View From a Broad"). That whole chapter was absolutely true. A lot of the stuff in that book is just totally fabricated, but that chapter was true - about that guy, that poor soul up in the dressing room sewing his shoes to the shower curtain. . ."
She broke up laughing. (Apparently you had to have read the book.)
"That was the first time I ever did Delores Delago the Toast of Chicago, the mermaid in the wheelchair," she continued, catching her breath, "and I was soooo terrified. And she became like the biggest hit! We took her to Europe and everything and she was like the toast of many, many countries."
That tour, in 1978, also started in Seattle. She hasn't toured since, concentrating instead on making movies.
Regina Hackett: P-I Critic
Paramount Theatre - Seattle, WA
Last night the Paramount Theater was a revival tent, packed with born-again Bette Midler fans. They loved her.
Rev. Moon would have a tough time getting that much adulation out of a house of Moonies, or President Reagan out of a room full of Nancys.
Midler basked in the affection and gave it back. Few performers ever achieve the electric connection with an audience that she can. She's more than a performer; she's a point of view - worldly wise but not world-weary.
Midler makes a performance click simply by toddling out on stage in her Divine Miss M.'s unmistakable mince. She throws open her arms, fluffs her bangs, leers at the audience, and that's enough. They go crazy, based on all the fun they had seeing past shows.
Most of the songs were new material, presumably from her not-yet released album, "No Frills." I particularly liked her version of the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden," even though when I heard she was going to do a Stones' song in this concert, I hoped it would be "Under My Thumb." If anyone could do the definitive female version of that raunchy classic, it's Midler.
This show, which opens a nation wide tour here, is more musical than the one she toured through Seattle '78.
Neal Hall: Sun Music Critic
Queen Elizabeth Theatre - Vancouver, BC
Going to a Bette Midler concert is a little like ordering a tuna sandwich and finding out that your tuna not only tastes good, but it sings, dances and tells jokes while you eat it.
Midler's sold-out show Monday at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre was Divine Madness (she appears for her second sold-out show tonight).
It was everything - and more - than expected by the 2,700 people who had paid $24 each to see the five-foot-one queen of camp strut her cheesy chutzpah.
The hilarious highlight of the night came about halfway through her two-hour extravaganza:
There was Bette as Delores Deleago, see, and her three sisters, all dressed in these floppy blue-sequin mermaid fins flapping about stage - in synchronized, motorized wheelchairs yet - disco dancing while singing a Sister Sledge song, We Are Family.
It was a brilliant mix of cheesy Las Vegas showbiz, synchronized dancing (a la the old Jackie Gleason show) and Mitzi Gaynor glitz, all set to Andrews Sisters' harmonies.
It was one of the few times when this reviewer found himself at a concert howling with laughter.
And then there were the jokes:
The wonderfully tacky between-song jokes about "Her Maj" the Queen; X-rated Sophie Tucker jokes; Canadian content jokes about Nelson Skalbania, Surrey and hosen; herpes jokes ("You always herp the one you love"); and jokes aimed at fitness gurus Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons.
Midler's biting wit left no insult unturned.
There was even a mini-movie, a Spanish subtitled spoof where Bette acts out her revenge on the film director of Jinxed, her latest film which bombed at the box office ("It suffered from projectionist interruptus," joked Midler. "It went before it even came").
Of course, who could forget Midler's memorable impressions of "vegetables I've known and loved."
Mainly she performed new material from her forthcoming LP, No Frills. And though it was billed as the No Frills tour, there were frills galore Monday - from the moment the curtains parted to reveal Midler skittering across the stage in a frilly pink smock and her Harletts dressed in short, ruffly crinoline skirts, until to the show's finale with Midler singing her theme song, Friends.
Still, Midler, backed by an impeccable, mainly black six-piece band, also offered some respite from the zany world of her bubbly stage persona, The Divine Miss M.
Occasionally, ever so briefly, the real Bette Midler seemed to sing - Bette Midler the little Jewish girl from Hawaii, who parlayed a bit part in the film Hawaii into a trip to New York, which in turn led to her singing in the Continental Baths (Barry Manilow was her piano player then), which eventually led to her smash debut album in 1972.
Ten years later, Midler is older, wiser and a bit chubbier. But she proved she can still tug the heart-strings when needed (especially on an old song, Superstar, with its heart-rending innocence).
But after three standing ovations and more than 16 costume changes, Miss M and her Harlettes vacated the stage, leaving the scent of The Rose trailing behind.
Never one to resist a wisecrack, Midler's parting words were: "Thank-you. You're more than kind . . .You're Canadian."
John F. Karr: Bay Area Reporter
Golden Gate Theatre - San Francisco, CA
For those who were there, a review can be so much jaw flapping. For those who were not, it can be a case of sour grapes. But Bette Midler has been a Gay audience centerpiece since she rose, like Venus from the sea, from the steaming pools of a Gay bathhouse to international tame. As the greatest entertainer of her generation, each of her infrequent tours bear discussion. Bette is closer to her identity and dreams, more revealing of her full talent, when live on stage. Like many stage greats, she's just too big, too extreme, to be fully captured on film. And I wouldn't have missed her current tour if I'd had to hock my gonads to get in.
The opening night audience looked like it had been cast by Fellini. The shared excitement and expectation was heady. For many, a Midler concert is a shrine, a ritual. With several years between her appearances, the tension builds. The ovation that hit her entrance - in a pink Baby Snooks smock - could have lifted a fuelless Concorde over the ocean.
Bette was flying, and flying dirty, too. "Honey, you're gonna love it, riding in the back of my plane," she sang with full innuendo. "Some say it's too big, some say it's too old." If anyone was worried that Bette might have changed, gone Hollywood or whatever, they were immediately reassured. Even her hair seemed returned to normal - or whatever passes as normal with this gal.
No, there were no changes in Bette. Only a surprising, gratifying maturing of her powers along with a solidification of the various strands that have composed her identity into one glorious bauble named Bette. She presented the best concert I've seen her give, and I've seen them all. Just as the qualities of a fine wine can be recognized before its maturity, so have Bette's. Yet this evening was obviously maturity, with all elements fully blended. The disparate sources of her concerts - rock, musical comedy, vaudeville, Sophie Tucker - were assimilated so we saw not the original speaking through Bette, but the originals become Bette.
The talking introductions of Sophie Tucker, for instance, reappeared as a typically vulgar Bette monologue, leading not to a Tucker song, but a number in contemporary rock idiom about boobs and legs. This led to that staple of burlesque, the balloon dance. Bette's balloons were giant tits.
She had spoken of recreating Le Petomane's act (he "sang" employing flatulence). We may have been lucky she was unable to do that. But she sure brought fun, innocent vulgarity and some grace to her balloon bosooms.
This was only the beginning. Sanity was banished. Bette gave us Disco Dada, an homage to the disco era performed by four mermaids in motorized wheelchairs, including tightly synchronized unison choreography and instrumental solos for the mermaids on accordion, chopsticks and twirling tennis balls.
And then she slipped with out a beat into Serious, with wrenching ballads, tears and croaking voice. She knows the madness is surface glitz, and spent more time on dramatic material, proving the depth of her ability. Still, the evening appeared a mere frippery when she performed "Stay With Me Baby," which showed an assimilation of the Joplin rock style fully into Bette. No more an effort or impersonation, it was one more style of performing that now spoke confidently in Bette's own voice.
Finally, as if to prove the maturing of her never before so previously unified talents, she demonstrated she was not afraid of her past personas. After an absence of several years, she returned "You've Got to Have Friends" to its traditional theme song position.
Bette Midler peaked with this concert. I've always loved her, laughed and cried with her. But I was caught unprepared for this sort of unity of conception, assimilation of styles and increased singing prowess. Here is the Bette we've always predicted. It's as if the struggles of Hollywood were a cocoon, from which Bette has emerged transfigured.
She had her say, too. "San Francisco," she exulted, "where it's a city!"
"We're gonna be here a whole week. I guess that makes me qualify as your live-in lover," she quipped over our fated spousal rights bill. "We're gonna give you all the benefits we can."
She related her meeting with Queen Elizabeth, knowing this was a city and audience that understood royalty. "Sometimes this Queen bizness really brings me down," she confided. "It's so hard to keep Our Imperial Shit together."
The evidence of this show proves that as a concert performer, Bette's shit is as together as it can be. She joins, firmly, the short list of entertaining greats who appear only rarely. What a revelation this concert was.
Unknown:
Los Angeles Herald
Universal Amphitheatre - Los Angeles, CA
Bette Midler has a talent problem: She has too much of it.
Midler began her career as a keen minded cabaret singer with a tight hold on rock, blues, soul and gospel mannerisms, and a quick, cutting flair for comic delivery. Indeed, there were some of us who found her capable of taking her cabaret informed style of artifice and working it for the kind of terrific emotional impact that always eluded smarter but more distant performers like Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro, who also sought to make a new rock 'n' roll synthesis out of blues and vaudeville.
By any immediate standards, it was a stimulating affair. Midler performed for roughly 2½ hours, accompanied by a masterful six piece backing band (including guitarist Buzzy Feiten and keyboardists Bobby Lyle and Bobby Martin) and a pert, especially funny new edition of her notorious backing vocal trio, the Harlettes.
In addition, Midler had plotted the evening's movement in meticulous and effective detail, including numerous resplendent costume changes and some sexy and dynamic choreography. (Both the costumery and the dancing combined for wonderful effect in a pointedly mocking skit that featured Midler and the Harlettes as a nostalgic disco-revue act, all suited up in floppy mermaid outfits, weaving around the stage in wheelchairs in a tight, synchronized line dance fashion).
Yet all this dazzling show work only served at times to detract from the central alluring fact of Midler's stage persona: a lonely, heartsick songstress who tells bawdy jokes to keep from crying. What this means is that Midler is usually most effective at her simplest taking a piece of treacly fluff like the Carpenters' hit "Superstar" and rendering it as a detailed performance of painful solitude.
In a show of this scope and impact - a show that seeks to match or secure the star's importance with a glitzy grandeur all its own - those kinds of personality stirring moments are necessarily few, but Midler provided them nonetheless. Perhaps the most affecting one occurred when she followed "Superstar" with an angry, razor witted version of the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden," with Midler mimicking Jagger's thick-tongued, snapping delivery with perfect flair.
What made that performance so memorable was the implied connection Midler was straining for with the songs, demonstrating how a desperate brand of loneliness can sometimes lead to emotional or sexual subjugation, but can also lead to proud, hard-willed self resolve. Later, during the show's second half, she made a similar point when she paired Tom Waits' anguished ballad, "Broken Bicycles" (from the One From the Heart soundtrack) with Jonathan King's wistful 1965 hit, "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," underscoring a mood of grieved estrangement.
Beyond those moments, Midler's show was mostly quick surface fun, which proved fun enough. She ran through a colorful sequence of theatrical-style rock tunes and eased her way through several sections of sustained comic patter that ridiculed the audience's hunger for sex-and-drugs humor even while pandering to it.
But beyond those aforementioned ballad readings, the best moment was a film clip adapted from Midler's latest artistic and commercial flop, "Jinxed." In the reworked version that Midler showed Monday night, she appeared as an Italian actress who comes up against director Don Siegel's unpredictable, punishing style and reacts with good humored vindictiveness against his demands for a campy, hyperbolic performance. That one superb send-up probably spoke more about the recurring artistic disappointments that Midler has suffered than any single song might have.
Nancy Bishop: Staff Writer of The News
Fairpark Music Hall - Dallas, TX
Bette Midler was everything she was supposed to be - trashy, classy, crude, funny and most of all a superb entertainer.
Her first live performance in Dallas Sunday night in more than seven years took off where her film Divine Madness left off. And it kept going and going until you were almost out of breath watching this human dynamo.
The Divine Miss M ventured out on this tour with a slightly different approach from what her zealous followers have seen. She can't cling to camp forever, but she reverted to her original style when the mood called for it, such as when she did Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy after the balloon number.
We don't want to spoil it for crowd who will see her second show Monday night at Fair Park's Music Hall, but this balloon number was about the funniest scene about large breasts since Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.
The balloons of course kept getting bigger, and the three Harlettes, wearing saloon-girl outfits, had props' that could be used in funny ways.
The first half of the show had more in it than what is usually strung out through a complete performance. Only a few slow moments were detected. But Miss Midler's slow moments might be other entertainer's showstoppers.
One reason her show worked as well as it did was the variety. She threw in a couple of jokes and then recreated her Delores DeLago the Toast of Chicago number while wearing a sequined mermaid outfit and riding around in a motorized wheelchair. In between, she sang a little bit of everything, including several striking new songs that should be in her No Frills album that will be released in March about the same time this tour ends at Radio City Music Hall in New York.
One nice new tune, That May Be All Need to Know, was sung while stepping out as close to the audience as she could get on the covered-up orchestra pit. This song, like most of the others, ended with cheers and sustained applause!
She seemed to thrive on contact with the crowd that had paid as much as $60 to scalpers for $20 seats.
Mikel Longoria: Staff Writer of The News
Fairpark Music Hall - Dallas, TX
It has been ages since anyone in Dallas has seen her, so it seemed only natural to ask this up front - "How have you been, Miss M?"
"I'm fine, just great," Bette Midler answered, calling from a Los Angeles recording studio, where she's wrapping up her latest album, No Frills.
Midler phoned to talk about her current concert tour, "D Tour," which she'll bring to the Fair Park Music Hall Sunday and Monday at 8 p.m..
"We've got lots and lots of new material," Midler said. "It's very accessible. And we've got a great band - only six pieces, with no horns or strings - but they make a lot of noise. And of course I have the girls with me (her three backup singers, the Harlettes).
"It's a very handsome show - it is a show," she emphasized. "There's lots of elaborate sets and costumes, plus a few surprises. And there's me."
Surprisingly, Midler seemed subdued and shy - friendly, but reserved and reflective. She wasn't trying to be "on." Though in the past she's described herself as "trash with flash," Midler leaves the tease and sleaze to her stage persona, the infamous Divine Miss M. They are not the same.
"I'm growing up a lot," Midler said. "I'm enjoying all of it, especially this trip. We've spent a lot of effort on it"
Told that her Dallas performances are virtual sell-outs, Midler was genuinely pleased. "Oh, good. That's a thrill." But why has it taken her so long to pay us a revisit?
"I haven't been on tour much for real in a long, long time. Since '72, really . . . I'm very excited about this. It's an eye-opener for me. I want to see what's really going on out there.
"We're' going all across the country. All through the South, then to the North. And the Midwest - I've never really played the Midwest."
Musically, both "D Tour" and No Frills herald new territory for Miss M. "No Frills has a little rougher sound," she explains. "I like all the material on it. It's very direct and to the point. I had a lot of fun doing it." The album will be out "I think in about a month, in early March. We're shooting for the first week of March."
Talking about living in Los Angeles, Midler conveyed mixed feelings. "I like the weather, and where I live. But you can't really get a handle on LA. There is no town. It's all so slick."
In a Dallas Morning News interview in '79, Miss M told how, as an extra on the film Hawaii, "you were not allowed within 20 feet" of the film's star, who was constantly surrounded by "layers of protectors." Is Midler afraid of the same thing happening to her, of losing contact with her public?
She answered with no hesitation. "It's already happened. That's part of the reason (for the tour) - so I can bust out of it."
Frank
Gagnard:
On The Scene
Orpheum Theatre - New Orleans, Louisiana
Tickets for the top-priced concert attraction of the season, Bette Midler's Jan. 29 appearance at the Orpheum Theater, went on sale at 10 a.m. Monday and were sold out slightly more than two hours later. With the house scaled at $35 and $32.50, the sellout should mean $68,292.50 at the box office.
The Midler booking was a gamble that paid off for promoter Barry Mendelson. Mendelson, a partner in the leasing group of the Saenger Performing Arts Center, was not able to engage the entertainer on his own premises because Lena Horne will be in residence there beginning Jan. 26. Instead he risked playing Midler at the smaller Orpheum at advanced ticket prices. The 519 seats in the second balcony sold for $32.50; all others at $35.
Cyndi Christian, manager of the Orpheum, said the ticket queue started early Sunday morning, when patrons appeared on University Place with thermo flasks, blankets and folding lawn furniture. About 40 customers were on hand when the box office opened Monday. "The line remained constant until about 11:30," Christian said. "By noon we had 26 seats left, and they were gone within the next half hour."
She said the customers represented a wide age group, but "no kids." "The bulk were in their late 20s to mid-30s, and some were older. All looked very nice - it was an educated bunch, very orderly, and everything ran so smoothly. We were worried about a I possible crowd."
Midler's erratic record at the box office should have been a source of anxiety. An engagement at the Blue Room early in her career saw less than impressive audiences, but she returned in concert to a huge crowd at the Municipal Auditorium. Her first film, "The Rose," won fans and an Oscar nomination, but the recent "Jinxed" disappeared quickly from view.
But she seems to remain a desirable concert commodity, whatever the price.
Mark Demeter: Concert Review
Orpheum Theatre - New Orleans, Louisiana
Bette Midler, the comedienne-cum-chanteuse, has come a long, long way since her Hew Orleans debut, a poorly attended engagement at the Fairmont Hotel's Blue Room in the early 1970s.
After establishing her early comedic and vocal credits, honed at New York's Continental Baths, Midler has achieved notable career heights as a recording artist; television-special star, Oscar nominated movie actress (and Oscar worthy Academy Award presenter) and caustic, eminently quotable social commentator.
And, of course, she has acquired a rabid following along the way. The announcement of her return to New Orleans (after a 10-year absence) prompted a box-office stampede and a sellout within hours. An added performance brought nearly the same instant-sellout response. The audience on hand for the Divine Miss M's opening show Sunday night, at the Orpheum Theater (just across the street from the Blue Room, mind you), seemed predisposed to love her.
Fortunately, the love match was fully in effect on both sides of the footlights. Midler's current on-the-road packaging, dubbed "De Tour," is a one of-a-kind talent/personality showcase - high-throttle entertainment geared to almost Pavlovian audience response (but also abundantly, unstintingly worthy of it, just in case).
Midler at her most quotable - and to this, writer, at least, her most memorable - is hardly fit for print in most daily newspapers, but her satirical, salacious barbs on Sunday were slung at the likes of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden ("What does she see in him?"), Olivia Newton-John, Nancy Reagan, Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale, the Pulitzers of Palm Beach ("I just love Roxannne . . . She's such a scream. I've got to write her a letter . . . "), Liberace ("Imagine . . . trying to tell us he's a homosexual"), Patty Hearst and, of course, England's royal family (Princess Margaret, in particular).
Sophie Tucker jokes took their place in the line up, too, as did inevitable comments on New Orleans at Carnival time: "The most marvelous thing about Mardi Gras is that I understand they do it totally without drugs." The lady still owns a wicked, witty tongue; the new material she unleashed on this visit likely will be circulating hereabouts for months to come.
Another, musical and comedic highlight came in her "In the Mood" Del Lago sisters routine - performed with her back-up vocal trio, the Harlettes - in which the four, clad as mermaids, caromed about the stage in motorized wheelchairs, sliding into chorus-line formations reflected in an overhead mirror (a Ia the June Taylor Dancers).
Midler's purely vocal gifts are distinctive, though scarcely as individualistic as her comedic ones. Her vocal equipment seemed to be in good shape Sunday, working through a repertoire that ranged from the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden" to "Don't Look Down" to an audience-enveloping sign-off with the theme from her movie "The Rose."
(This audience member's perception of the show was to a large extent hampered, both visually and especially aurally, by his placement in a stage hugging box seat directly in front of a loudspeaker, the folks in the balcony undoubtedly had the prize berths.)
Midler's "De Tour" performances - Sunday and Monday - were presented here by promoter Barry Mendelson.
Linda R.
Thorton:
Special to The Herald
Sunrise Theatre - Fort Lauderdale,
FL
Some performers known for their bizarre stage antics haven't got enough talent to last after the shocks wear thin. Some blessed with magnificent voices or born to dance wouldn't dream of lowering themselves to the buffoon level.
Bette Midler, though foremost a singer, is equally fabulous as a campy comedienne, without sacrificing one talent for the sake of the other.
Within three minutes of skipping on stage at the Sunrise Musical Theatre Thursday night, dressed in one of her purposely tacky outfits, Midler was down on the floor, bouncing the colorful ruffles under her bright pink coat as she belted out Pink Cadillac from a reclining position. That was only the beginning of a sizzling, sensational show packed with nonstop music, surprises and outrageous camp.
With the support of her three back-up singers, the Harlettes, and an excellent six-piece band; Midler's show is so musically tight that it should have been recorded for a live album.
Midler sings her hits, such as Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, You've Got to Have Friends and The Rose, other songs from past albums, some good, driving rock 'n' roll from her upcoming album, and arrangements of the Carpenters' Long Ago and Far Away and the Rolling Stones' Beast of Burden that sound better than the originals.
She knows how to grab the audience, not only with her music, but also with her scandalous humor. Four letter words and crude jokes fly freely, but what makes it all right is that Midler is never mean, just daring.
As her well-loved character "Delores DeLago" and sisters, Midler and the Harlettes coast on stage in motorized wheelchairs, dressed in sequined mermaid outfits, poking fun at disco, accordions and chorus line choreography as they drive around each other and wave their tails. Midler also treats her fans to the bawdy character "Sophie" in her closest thing to a straight stand-up comedy routine.
Midler's performance is much more than a concert. It's more like a Las Vegas revue, with comedy, parody, choreography, exquisite lighting and excellent staging.
A telling indicator of a satisfied audience on opening night was during the encore, when Midler finally sang The Rose. She stopped more than once to urge the crowd to sing along. Though some started to sing, they soon fell quiet. The loveliness of Midler's voice in this beautiful song deserved all their attention.
Bill Watson: Unknown
Sunrise Theatre - Fort Lauderdale,
FL
She's rude, she'd crude, she's socially unacceptable. She's nasty, she's tacky, she's totally over-sexual.
She's Bette Midler.
But if all those things are true why would there be more than 4,000 people packed into the Sunrise Theatre last Friday night paying about $25 a seat to see this wanton woman?
Because Bette's a performer. She's a performer who'll knock her lights out to please her audience. She's an entertainer who knows what her audience wants and she's prepared to give it to them as often as they can plead for more.
Standing out in the lobby before the show it was apparent that there's one thing even Bette's biggest fans forget about her - she's a hell of a singer. Her fans remember her costumes and her outrageous jokes but they seem to forget the gilt-edged voice.
Her voice was never more obviously clean when she performed her rendition of "Superstar," a heart breaker no matter who's singing it, but with Bette behind it, a heart stopper.
But her singing isn't the only thing that packs arenas wherever she goes, it's the Bette persona. And a large part of that persona is the jokes she tells. These were Sophie Tucker's jokes decades ago but Bette's rediscovered them and made them hers. Here's one of the few that can be reprinted in a "family" newspaper
"I fell in love with my boyfriend Ernie not long after I buried my husband Jake. I'll never forget the first time we were in the sack. It was right in the middle of the action. Ernie broke down in great, wracking sobs. I said, 'Ernie, get a hold of yourself, what's the matter?' He said to me, 'Soph, I can't stand it. I can't stand the thought that I'm in Jake's place.' I said to him, 'Don't worry Ernie. Jake's place was about five inches further down.' "
Another portion of the Bette persona is undoubtedly Delores Delago. For those uninitiated fans out there Delores is the mermaid in the motorized wheelchair. She's the archetypical "lounge act." In Bette's latest concert tour, dubbed, "De Tour," Delores is joined onstage by her three sisters, the Harlettes (Bette's backup singers), who also roll on stage in their own wheelchairs.
The Delago act is a breathtaking piece of choreography (you try taking four wheelchairs onstage without a single crash), a piece of outrageous camp (they sing jazzed-up disco hits), and nostalgia (they lock arms and suddenly they're doing Esther Williams numbers right on stage).
But again, there's Bette on stage by herself singing with the help of a very together band. She sings about 15 or 16 numbers during her two-hour show. Some of the tunes are past hits, but a greater number seemed to be brand new. It didn't matter - singing to her fans Bette is incapable of errors. She's flawless.
Strange though, she can't shake the image she painted in her film, The Rose. Her audience still wants to cuddle her, reassure her and make sure everything's all right. During one of the quieter opening numbers someone in the crowd yelled out, "We love you!" and she replied quickly, with total honesty, "No, no. I'm all right! Who else needs a pat on the back out there?"
She really does care, this Divine Miss M. She cares so much that she's not the least bit offended when she is handed a tacky, plastic rose that Sunrise is selling in the lobby. Instead, she turns the gift in to a joke and gets a laugh out of it. A lesser performer might have been upset.
She rolls her eyes skyward when the band breaks into "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy," indicating that maybe the previous 10,000 times she's sung the song should seem like enough to her fans. But she knows that they feel cheated if they don't get to see it so she obliges politely.
From time to time an entertainer writer will attend a concert and write, "Joe Blow was not in rare form last night. He cheated the audience out of their hard-earned dough."
Friday night Bette had none of that. She'd be the first to say it, "I'm working my little tush off for you!" And so she does!
Susan
Allred: Red and Black Staff Writer
Fox Theatre - Atlanta, GA
For somebody who makes an inauspicious entrance, Bette Midler puts on a spectacular show.
At most concerts, you expect to hear the band warm themselves and the audience up for five minutes or so before the stars come out. Bette does it differently. The lights go down, the band starts up, and in two measures, Bette is out.
She strides onto the stage in her obnoxious pink housecoat romper and you know a deal's been struck. You pay your $17.50, but you take no chances. Miss M won't renege on her deal.
The opening number in this weekend's set of four comedy-musical shows at the Fox Theater was "Better Not Look Down," a blues-rock mixture indicative of the new direction Midler has taken. She minces around the stage in her black stiletto heels and spandex toreador pants, singing out her new motto, "You'll keep on moving if you don't look down."
Some may remember Bette's old motto - "F--'em if they can't take a joke." She's still pouring out the jokes, but these days it looks more like she cares who gets them.
Miss M and her Harlettes make you love bad taste. The old characters were back in their bad form. There were Sophie and her boyfriend Ernie, a disgusting lout, and Delores DeLavo and her sisters, cackling and shrieking out the trashy flash.
Sophie tells the jokes Mae West couldn't get away with. Delores sings tacky songs dressed in a mermaid's costume and sitting in a motorized wheelchair.
The new material has all the chutzpah you could ask for. There was a wicked film satire of Bette's recent flop, "Jinxed" and an unapologetic version of Leon Russell's "Superstar." Then Miss M took the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden" and put it back on the blues side where it belongs.
Delores has been in her wheelchair and fins for a few years, but for "De Tour," as Midler's current jaunt was dubbed, the Harlettes joined her there. In a flashing-light, heavy-backbeat tribute to disco, the DeLavo sisters blared out a medley of "We Are Family," "I Will Survive" and "In the Mood," all the while driving their wheelchairs to distraction.
In the grand tradition of total theater, Bette did some comedy and some light acting, but the feature was her incomparable singing.
Her new direction, Bette said, is rhythm and blues. She's got the soul and the pain for it. When she sang "You Gotta Have Faith" at the close of the show, Bette left the stage and walked in the audience. She was scared doing it. There was fear on her face, because breaking down the barrier between audience and performer is nearly unheard of for one as big as Miss M. But she had faith in her fans.
Bette Midler may be moving to R&B, but she's building a bridge and taking rock 'n roll and romance with her.
Frank Rizzo:
Courant Rock Critic
Civic Center - Hartford, CT
Bette Midler punningly named her series of concerts "De-Tour '82-'83" and in a way that best described her own show.
A detour is a route off the main path, a deviation that's sometimes rough going but sometimes full of pleasant surprise, that eventually leads travelers to their destination.
Midler took the more than 12,000 fans at the Hartford Civic Center Friday night on such a wobbly yet wonderful ride.
First she delighted fans with the outrageous aspect of herself which she has labeled "The Divine Miss 'M.'" This character, for all its dare and outspokenness, is a safe Bette. She's funny, sassy and smart, and everyone loves a clown, especially one with talent and great material.
But for this show she also exposed more of the despairing chanteuse - the vulnerable, lonely woman who is still groping with fame, fortune and power. It's a character that evoked the fragility of a Garland, a Joplin.
But the Divine One was the obvious audience pleaser and, like a pop musician who knows the right hooks, she played every familiar riff for all it was worth. Her naughty songs and bitchy chatter were collective wish fulfillment for an audience eager to be tickled.
No one knows the device of localizing a show better than Bette. "Ah Hartford," she sighed near the start of the show, "city of one million people, one hundred stories." She also delivered the day's headlines and worked into her act the names of some provincial personalities such as Brad Davis and Hilton Kaderli.
She also devastated such subjects as aerobic exercising, cocaine users, the queen of England, and high technology. ("Please God, let home computers be a phase. I got in show business just so I wouldn't have to be a data processor.")
Midler also performed as that precursor to the Divine One - Sophie Tucker. "These are Sophie's choices," she said of the debauched series of late-night jokes, all of which would singe the edges of any family newspaper.
But it was the Divine One's musical routines which were the show-stoppers, especially the part of her concert she called "Disco Memories." In her salute to "the grandeur that was boomtitty-boom-titty-boom," she' performed a possessed "We Are Family" and "I Shall Survive" with her three backup singers, the Harlettes. They were all dressed as mermaids and sang while buzzing around the stage in electric wheelchairs.
Another parody was at her own expense: the screening of a clip from her disastrous film, "Jinxed." This re-edited version turned the scene into a foreign language film, complete with subtitles that poked fun at the cinematic debacle. It underlined Midler's "laugh-at-yourself-honey-before-they-laugh-at-you" philosophy.
For the more than two hours that she performed on stage, Midler sang most of her standards, such as "In the Mood," "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," "Friends," "My Mother's Eyes," and a gentler version of "Superstar" (minus the usual Karen Carpenter jokes she has used to introduce the song at previous concerts).
But she dared to dominate her more than 20 songs with new material. Fresh material, such as "You Better Not Look Down" "All I Need to Know," "It Should Have Been Me," "Pink Cadillac," "Just a Girl With Moonlight in My Eyes," and "You're My 'Favorite Waste of Time" demanded, and received, a little more effort on the audience's part.
But not everything worked like magic. The song which ended the first half of the show simply came across as strange, perhaps signaling more of the decorum to come.
Later, in the second half of the show, Midler was dressed in an achingly elegant gown, with swirls, folds and classical lines that made her seem more at home, on top of a Doric column. Even those saucy tarts, the Harlettes, returned looking and acting like extras in a beaux-arts pageant.
Midler's personal angst, "Stay With Me Baby," was sung that the grand gestures seemed more fitting. It was opera and blues and pop and pain and therapy - all at once. This was de facto art.
At the end of the show, after singing "The Rose," she returned again and again for bows. And then, exiting the stage for the last time in her classy dress, she flipped up her gown and wiggled her bottom.
It's nice to know that in the pursuit of her art's desires, there will always be a little of Miss "M" left in Midler. And that's simply divine.
Ken Tucker:
Inquirer Popular Music Critic
Academy Of Music - Philadelphia, PA
Bette Midler's "De Tour," which opened for a three-night stand at the Academy of Music last night, is a fast, furious, two-and-a-half hours of aggressive behavior. Over the course of the evening, Midler croons pretty ballads, tells dirty jokes, dons outlandish costumes, hectors her audience, howls out passionate rock 'n' roll, and generally suggests that she may be the most exciting stage performer you've ever seen.
"Hi, Philly," she yelled last night. "It's good to be back - I didn't want to make my return until Frankie Rizzo made his." And indeed, this tour represents Midler's return to conccert performance after a few rocky years as a movie actress, first in the hit The Rose, and then in the bombs Divine Madness and Jinxed. Much has been made of Midler's time in Hollywood - her initial triumph, and her failure to find a follow-up hit film.
But unlike most performers who score heavily in Hollywood, Midler hasn't been deadened by her fame - she hasn't become drugged with celebrity. Indeed, the great thing about "De Tour" last night was that Midler seemed so unashamedly eager to prove herself; she acted as if she didn't know that everyone in the room loved her. Midler spent the first half of her show singing mostly singing new songs, many of them from her forthcoming album, "No Frills." It is indeed no-frills music - pumped-up rock performed by an efficient six-piece band.
Midler took the stage dressed in her version of anti-chic: an iridescent multicolored tutu under a frumpy pink lab coat. It's such a bizarre get-up that you begin to wonder whether there's a metaphor lurking in this outfit - dancing gets clinical? Art meets science?
In thee past, Midler has used such campiness as an end in itself: to play up to the hip segment of her audience and to freak out the square fans. But last night, it was clear that she had moved beyond such coyness - she belted out a version of Moon Martin's "Cadillac Walk" that had everything: fire, humor and irony. With her very first song, Midler had managed to face down the quandary that has plagued her ever since she played that rock-star-on-the-rocks in The Rose - namely, that Bette Midler is not a rock singer, and she's not even a pop singer in the manner of, say, Kim Carnes or Christopher Cross. She's some original combination of cabaret chanteuse, not the sort of hybrid destined to top the record charts, and, with the exception of the title song from The Rose, Midler has indeed never had a chart-topping hit. But last night Midler refashioned rock 'n' roll to suit her style; she zeroed in on the melody and let the band handle the heavy beat. It was a strategy that worked beautifully, and that made the first half of her show chug along like a locomotive gathering steam.
In this effort, Midler was helped considerably by the latest version of the Harlettes, back-up singers with sass and personality. Throughout the evening, this trio - Katey Sagal, Linda Hart and Ula Hedwig - not only cooed refrains behind Bette, but also helped her to enact little scenes and provided a jaded, sexy Greek chorus to her outpouring of eloquent babble.
As is her wont, Midler stopped the proceedings regularly to address the multitudes, lancing our smiles with barbs about everything from cocaine to herpes (don't ask). Personally, I would love Midler if she did nothing but stand still and tell jokes - given the unevenness of her music, in fact, I'd prefer it sometimes. But then she abruptly stopped chatting and slammed into a breathless vehement rendition of the Rolling Stones' "Beast Of Burden," and turned the stones' latest version of misogyny into an anthem of self-assertion. It was a great, audience challenging performance.
After an intermission, Midler reentered as her old stage character Delores Delago, a mermaid who ambulates about the stage in an electric wheelchair. This time, though, Midler had added something new - the Harlettes were similarly attired, as the Delago Sisters, and the four of them wheel and were back and forth, executing intricate wheelchair choreography while thrilling moldy old disco hits such as "We Are Family" and "I Will Survive." If you think all of this is in bas taste, you're right; it is also hilarious.
But the second half of Midler's show runs into a problem: To please her fans, to give them what they paid for, Midler is compelled to sing all the old songs her cult adores - Buzzy Linhart's "Friends," "The Rose," and too many more. Midler gave these songs extravagantly melodramatic readings, as if to say, "you want a good cry? Here - start getting misty-eyed!" It's effective, but it's also tedious.
And discouraging as well, because it suggests that Bette Midler is a star trapped by her audience, doomed to sing these chestnuts over and over forever. There was a substantial amount of applause and cheering for her new material, but the fans went wild for the inferior, familiar material. It was, all in all, a first-rate show, but the kindest thing Bette Midler's admirers could do is to let their idol get on with her career - holding her in the past is a mistake.
Ron
Weekes:
Tribune Special Writer
Holiday Star Theatre - Merrillville, IN
The courtroom is silent. Bette Midler, the accused, stands before the judge. "Your Honor," intones the plaintiff, "if indulgence in riotous behavior be a misdemeanor, we move that the accused is a felon on the grand scale."
Last Saturday, the verdict was unanimous, A capacity crowd in Merriville's Holiday Star Theatre, testified to the crazed yet brilliant talent of the "Divine Miss M."
From the moment the 5-foot-1 dynamo rocked onto stage, garbed in pink duster and black satin pedal pushers, right down to her heart-wrenching finale "The Rose," Midler held 3,500 people in the palm of her hand. "You people are starved for entertainment," she shouted to a delirious gathering.
Bette Midler is the kind of outrageous, hell come-what-may performer who makes for good copy. She moons audiences, performs wheelchair close-order drill, besmirches the Queen and Lady Di, and commits other improprieties with wild abandon. More often than not, such antics work because of her marvelous facility for temporarily disarming the audience by jolting the senses.
"I just try to have a good time and let the audience in on the secret," she once remarked. "It's like giving a party at which I am the Grand Hostess." One sting of Midler's full-throttled magnetism and your a gonner.
The 2 ½ show, billed as De Tour 82/83, began with lesser-known musical selections "Pink Cadillac" and "Cadillac Walk," followed by a rousing "Better Not Look Down." A devotee of vaudeville, Bette charmed the group with her Sophie Tucker routines, too ribald to mention here.
As the house lights dimmed, a giant screen was rolled on stage. Perhaps in reply to recent criticism of her movie "Jinxed," Midler camped her way through an uproarious spoof of the film.
Throughout the evening, Bette was joined by the singing / dancing Harlettes, namely Kay Segal, Ula Hedwig and Linda Hart. Their rendition of "Pretty Legs and Great Big Knockers" left the crowd in stitches. The diva then followed with her ever popular "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and a tuneful "Soda and a Souvenir."
The second half began with a trio of disco memories, "We Are Family," "In the Mood," and Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive." Barely recovering from that set, the audience was mesmerized by "My Mother's Eyes," from the "Divine Madness" soundtrack.
Bobby Martin, one of six artists in Midler's band, added a nice touch with his French horn accompaniment.
Song after song, Midler displayed an astounding breadth of emotion and vocal virtuosity. From hard-rock to soul and light-hearted melodies, the lady proved a crowd pleaser. Her presentation of "Here Comes the Flood" brought down the house, as did the moving "Stay With Me," nicely orchestrated by conductor Bobby Lyle.
One of Midler's earliest hits, "Friends," was received amidst great cheering as the singer moved throughout the house, shaking hands and accepting bouquets. While her closing number, "The Rose," is always good for a tear or two, it might have been more effective in another segment of the show.
A mammoth sound system added to the power of performance but, at times, appeared overpowering, causing some distortion. Inventive costuming and Picasso-motif sets added visual interest, while the crowd seemed to delight in Midler's political satire and local references.
Perhaps gauging our response, Midler had earlier in the show remarked, "Thank God you can tell the difference between real art and mere craftsmanship." If numerous standing ovations and emotional outpouring are any indication, Bette Midler proved an entertainer of the first magnitude.
Rick
Brotman: Unknown
Civic Auditorium - Baltimore, MD
My Initial reaction to Bette Midler has always been one of amazement: I mean it amazes me that anyone with that much on her chest can sing the way Midler can sing. Seriously though, this woman is truly one of the most talented performers to come down the pike in a long time. Her March 4th concert at the Civic Center was sheer joy from start to finish.
Basically a cabaret-type singer, Midler obviously has a firm grasp of numerous musical styles. The concert had something for just about everyone. Literally skipping on stage, the Divine Miss M was greeted by thunderous applause from a truly civilized audience (no pungent aroma of marijuana from this crowd, just the reek of Shalimar). She opened the show with a rowdy rock n' roll tune called "Pink Cadillac," during which she brought out the Harlots, three wonderfully trashy-looking ladies who provided excellent backing vocals. Welcoming the audience to "Our Rights of Spring," Midler informed the crowd of her new motto, "don't look down" and with that launched into the next number of the same title. Other up-tempo tunes included Bob Seeger's "Fire Down Below" and the Stone's "Beast of Burden." Two classics of yesteryear, "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and "In the Mood" brought the audience to peaks of well-mannered insanity.
As gifted a comedienne as she is a singer, Midler had the house in stitches between numbers, telling jokes and stories that this publication could never print. She made a verbal pass at our own Mayor Schaefer, "He can park at my Harborplace anytime," and even addressed the front row as the Pikesville crowd, "Vogue on the outside, vague on the inside."
On the softer side, Midler performed several ballads and breathy torch songs such as "My Mother's Eyes," "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," "Stay With Me," and a classic from her terrific debut album, "Superstar," a Leon Russell-Bonnie Bramlett composition.
After a twenty minute intermission, Midler and the Harlots returned as Delores DeLargo and the DeLargo Sisters for a (Yuk!) Disco Revisited Review. As much as I loathe disco music, this was the highlight of the concert. Wearing gaudy blue mermaid costumes, Midler and company performed a very tongue-in-cheek version of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" while (are you ready for this?) riding around the stage in motorized wheel chairs. Hopping on their fins when necessary, these four mad-women actually got down on the floor of the stage, and after a huge slanted mirror was lowered into place to provide an over-head view, they engaged in some horizontal choreography that would have made June Taylor proud.
Midler closed the show with "Friends," a Buzzy Linhart-Mark Klingman song from her first album. Following a frantic standing ovation, she returned to introduce the members of her band and perform "The Rose," for which she invited the audience to join in. We did, and this very moving song brought to an end a great concert by a tremendously gifted entertainer.
Stephen Holden:
Unknown
Radio City Music Hall - New York City, NY
Bette Midler has always tried for the nearly impossible onstage: the creation of a show-business personality who could embrace the worlds of vaudeville, legitimate theater and rock all in a single evening. Miss Midler has long possessed the theatrical resources for the task, for her sensibility contains a multitude of full-fledged characters, from sad-eyed waifs to her scintillating bawdy alter ego, The Divine Miss M.
The only uncertain element in Miss Midler's arsenal has been her singing voice. An expressive cabaret interpreter, Miss Midler nevertheless frequently floundered when she tackled rock. Even in "The Rose," the size of her voice didn't match the emotional dimensions of her Janis Joplin like role, and in climactic moments, the singer resorted to frayed desperate shouting.
It was a happy surprise, therefore, when Bette Midler unveiled a newly fortified rock singing voice at Monday's special preview performance of her Radio City Music Hall show, whose sold-out run ends Monday. Not only did Miss Midler stay consistently on pitch, she interpreted demanding rock ballads like "Stay With Me" with an impressive dynamic control and sustained long phrases that never gave way to amusical histrionics.
"Stay With Me" was one of several remarkable vocal performances in which the singers technique matched her emotional involvement. The Leon Russell-Bonnie Bramlett ballad "Superstar," which Miss Midler used to sing from the viewpoint of star-struck groupie, was reconceived as the sensual obsession of a disappointed older woman. Peter Gabriel's apocalyptic rock ballad, "Here Comes the Flood," received a strong, whisky-voiced interpretation that culminated chillingly, with the singer winding her blouse over her head like a shroud. And Miss Midler's punchy rendition of the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden" transformed a flippant pledge of male loyalty into a reflection on the amorous difficulties facing a female rock star.
The strength of Miss Midler's singing threw her comedy routines into brilliant relief. In one number, she and her backup trio, the Harlettes, performed an uproarious "disco review" as mermaids in wheelchairs. Miss Midler's patter had its usual quotient of cuttingly candid remarks and smutty jokes, but her delivery didn't evince the same desperate desire to amuse that sometimes characterized her work in the past. Even her riskiest material was delivered with a new air of dignity. This firm sense of emotional control gave the evening a shape and purpose that her earlier revues have lacked. For the first time on a New York stage, Miss Midler's vaudeville and rock aspirations coincided happily and with total confidence.
Earnest Leogrande: Unknown
Radio City Music Hall - New York City, NY
Bette Midler drops into a full split at the beginning of her new show at Radio City Music Hall, looks out at the audience with a proud and wicked grin and says, "Did you see that? On stage two minutes and I'm on my -- already." To repeat the first few minutes of her conversation with the audience would require so many other blank spaces for deleted expletives that readers could use the space for a note pad.
So suffice it to say that the Midler is back, as rousingly vulgar as ever and in fine tune with her audience, a super-show woman who has refined her act to an almost clockwork precision while appearing to remain the absolutely unrefined person her fans know and love.
In the new show, called "De Concert," part of a tour called De Tour, she takes her usual break to tell a string of bawdy jokes in a parody of Sophie Tucker - she now calls the jokes "Sophie's Choices" - but she closes her show with the uplifting gospel-like sweep of the theme song from her movie, "The Rose," presented to the audience in a spirit of inspirational sincerity. Throughout the show, which opened officially Tuesday night after a preview Monday, she demonstrates that she knows how to accomplish this shift in moods quickly but smoothly and to take the audience along with her wherever she leads.
The contrast is reflected in Midler garb, beginning with orange minidress with multi-colored flounces that make it look like a flossy lampshade and ending with a long gown of quiet blue cut with the simplicity of a toga.
The show includes a varying range of material, from her early hit "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy" to the new and new wavishly delivered "Got My Eye on You." Her ability to incorporate mood into material is demonstrated in a trio of songs that turn into a single, shifting statement, beginning with the comic-bitter "It Should Have Been Me," shifting into the masochistically melancholy "Superstar" and ending with the defiant "Beast of Burden," which turns the tables on male chauvinism.
There is a sequence from Midler's recent flop movie, "Jinxed," dubbed into mock Italian and using English subtitles, that gets back in hilarious fashion at the people who she feels done her wrong in the making of that movie.
Unlike some of her other shows, this one does not use any spectacular props for effects and the comparative simplicity works to its advantage. The musical arrangements and musicianship are superlative and individual mention is deserved: musical director and pianist Bobby Lyle, guitarist Buzz Feiten, keyboard player Bobby Martin, drummer Ricky Lawson, bassist Pops Popwell and percussionist Malanda Gassama. Her versatile backup trio, De Harlettes - Ula Hedwig, Linda Hart and Katey Sagal - show more than vocal and dance ability in a vaudeville-night club routine with Dolores De Lago, the mermaid in a wheelchair, a recurring character in Midler stage shows.
The show continues through Monday but all performances were sold out long ago and the Music Hall says there is no chance of extending it because of commitment to the incoming "Porgy and Bess."
Ira Mayer: Unknown
Radio City Music Hall - New York City, NY
The show Bette Midler brought to Radio City Music Hall last night was the most musical since her earliest concerts 10 years ago.
De Tour, as the pink posters around town put it, may not be up to the gloriously outrageous production standards of, say, her Clams on the Half Shell revue, but it's a solid singing performance all the way through.
For this long-sold out week stay at the Music Hall Miss Midler is supported by the finest group of back-up musicians she's ever used, and by a singing and dancing trio of Harlettes that has similarly never been better.
Most of all, Miss Midler's voice is in phenomenal shape. She attacked the Rolling Stones' Beast of Burden with jungle-like ferocity and rendered Stay With Me Baby with equally passionate tenderness.
The show itself was also excitingly big on new additions to the Midler repertory - most of them with a hard, rock-oriented edge to them.
While touches of '40s flourishes were still in evidence - in a spectacular mermaid-bedecked rendition of In the Mood, and the requisite Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy - the tougher sound was definitely (and welcomely) dominant.
None of' which is to suggest that the old production number Miss Midler was in absentia.
A second half curtain-raiser devoted to "disco memories" found Miss Midler and the Harlettes "dancing" out the choreography from motorized wheelchairs.
And of course there were the jokes about Soph and Ernie, along with bawdy tales of royalty . . . and sex. Routines she'll be repeating for the next week to crowds that waited up to 10 hours in line to purchase their tickets.
The first half of the evening lacked the cohesiveness of a real "show," even if the individual numbers all worked.
In the second half however, she pulled together all the elements to bring a cheering house of 6000 to its feet singing her theme song Friends and the title number from The Rose.
Steve Morse:
Globe Staff
Opera House - Boston, MA
It was St. Patrick's Day in Boston and Bette Midler wasn't about to let the moment slip by. As saucy and irreverent as ever, she bounced around the stage, protruding her chest and bellowing, "Erin go braless! That's what I say!"
The crowd burst into laughter. After all, the Divine Miss M, ever armed with a whiplash dirty wit, was only up to her old verbal shock tactics. And after a five-year absence from Boston, it was just good to see her back on stage, even if Irish consciences were slightly bruised.
But Midler didn't stop there. By the end of her shattering two-and-a-half hour romp, the bodacious Queen of Camp, otherwise known as the 80s' answer to Mae West, had fired salvos in all directions. Turning loose a tongue that she boasted "could clip a hedge," she cut into everyone from Liberace and Jane Fonda to the royal tandem of Lady Diana and Queen Elizabeth, who In Midler's ripest street accent were termed "broads."
A blur of nonstop commotion and costume changes, Midler, looking fit from "aerobicizing and jazz-exercising," delivered a scintillating tour de force last night in the opening of her five straight sellouts at the Opera House.
Before a worshipful audience that willingly suspended its adulthood to enter into her boldly off-color grasp, Midler electrified with new songs, jokes, dance routines and even a clip from her last film, "Jinxed," which had been hammily redubbed into Italian and given a new story line in which Bette escapes from a deranged caveman she had thought was a film director (Her contempt for the breed was evident.) and puts acid in his drink.
Apart from the madness, Midler again stunned the crowd with her effortless vocal range. She charmed with beseeching love ballads and drew chortles with her perennial swing-time favorite, "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." She sang more rock music than usual - including a lively version of the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden" - but really outdid herself in a disco medley during which she and her three backup singers, the equally bawdy Harlettes, wore sequined halter tops and mermaid fins while spinning around outrageously in electric wheelchairs. They then gathered their wheelchairs in a circle, kicked their legs high and mimicked old Busby Berkley routines while an overhead mirror reflected the synchronized antics out to the audience.
But even such latter-day Rabelaisian cabaret took a back seat to her sparkling stand-up comedy lines. Strutting about the stage with her familiar hunched shoulders and mincing footsteps, Midler offered a series of new (and unprintable) Sophie Tucker jokes." In other comic interludes, she lambasted the video revolution ("I don't know a VCR from an IUD,"), home computers ("Pleeeease God, let computers be a passing fad"'), cocaine-snorting celebrities, Combat Zone hookers, communist plots, punk fashions and of course her old favorite, art, or, as she wrote in the tour program sold in the lobby: "Art as in Byron, Botticelli, Bicasso and now Bette."
Other than a momentary hitch in the film clip, there were no dead spots. Pulling out a glittery hula hoop for one number was fairly trite - especially when she raised it over her head "like a halo - but she made up for it by then bringing the house down with an all-out, Janis Joplin-like plea on "Stay with Me," taken from her movie "The Rose,"
From biting comedienne to tender chanteuse, Bette Midler can still do it all.
Larry Katz: Music Review
Opera House - Boston, MA
The Divine Miss M. is back - more divine than ever.
Bette Midler kicked off a five-day stand at the Opera House, St. Patrick's Day night with a high-spirited, high-energy show that touched the hearts and funny bones of a sold-out house.
After a five-year absence from Boston, Midler conclusively proved to her adoring fans that her voice has never been in better shape.
At 8 p.m., the curtain went up, the crack sixpiece band launched into a smoking funk groove, and Bette came bounding out in a shocking pink tunic that made her look like a New Wave Little Miss Muffet. Quickly, she was joined by her three brazenly beautiful backup singers, The Harlettes.
"Some of this show is so wild, so daring, so rude, so artsy," Midler told the crowd, "that even I can't keep up!"
Between songs, Midler gave the audience a mega-dose of dirty jokes and humorous social commentary. Midler made merry of everyone from Queen Elizabeth to Liberace to Jane Fonda ("Doesn't she look great? - for her age. Did ya see 'Golden Pond'? She sure had to suck in her gut for that one!").
Midler also expressed her displeasure with cable television ("A hundred and fifty channels - and there's still nothing to watch) and the computer revolution ("Please let home computers be a passing fad. I went into show business so I wouldn't have to be a data processor!").
Midler also screened a riotously funny five minute clip from her recent cinematic debacle "Jinxed," dubbed into Italian with English subtitles. She cavorted with two giant balloons while singing "Great Big Knockers," changed into the gown she wore at last year's Academy Awards and sang a Pat Benatar-like rocker she ended by flinging herself to the floor - and that was just the first half of her show.
After a half-hour intermission, Midler and the Harlettes returned in mermaid costumes, driving electric wheelchairs. While singing "We Are Family" and "I Will Survive," they spun madly around stage in a choreographed routine that would have made Busby Berkeley smile.
Midler calls her current jaunt through the northeast "De Tour." Last night "De Tour" was a tour de force. Brava Bette.
Joyce Millman -
Boston Phoenix
Opera House - Boston, MA
Bette Midler flaunts her bazooms the way Barbra Streisand flaunts her schnoz. For both entertainers, these fruits of nature's generosity are a stamp of authenticity - physical assurance that, yes, these grand stars are as humanly imperfect as we schleps across the footlights. A week ago, during her five sold-out performances of "De Tour" at the Opera House, Midler was as adorably blowzy as she'd been when she first jiggled her way to fame, more than 10 years ago. The almond eyes still squinted and the crocodile grin still flashed every time diminutive Bette skipped around the stage, nearly bouncing her Jane-Russell-sized breasts out of her trashy-but-flashy push 'em-up brassiere ('"Yes they are fabulous, aren't they"'). Near the end of the first act, Midler and her backing trio, the Harlettes, performed a sublimely vulgar tune called "Great Big Knockers" while holding balloon mammaries in front of their chests; Midler, of course, toted pink ones so huge that they bowled her over, one sailing into the wings while she used the other for a slippery prop in a deliciously unladylike fan dance.
Women adore Midler for the same reason gay men do (and for the reason that straight men often find her unappetizing): she thrusts out her bosom with a mixture of pride and flippancy, celebrating her femininity while sending it up. She undercuts her ripe, sex-symbol figure with a ripe, longshoreman's vocabulary; she's forever flipping the bird at sexist stereotypes. "Show us your tits!" yelled a voice from the balcony at Monday night's show. "Show us your tits, show us your tits," mimicked Midler, at an auctioneer's pace. "Okay. Either I show you my tits or I do the rest of the show. What'll it be? Oh, if I show you my tits I can go home? No? You want me to do the rest of the show and show you my tits? Hey, fuck you!"
Like many ugly ducklings, Midler achieved swan stardom swathed in a dream-sized new personality. The Divine Miss M is part tramp, part chanteuse, part clown; and Midler often plays her like a dynamo, careful not to slow down her mesmerizing spin. But she gives us a glimpse of her plain-little-Jewish-girl insecurity in her tender identification with others whose lives hinge on shaky illusions - the jilted, deluded fiancée of "Delta. Dawn," the lonely old woman of "Hello in There," the self-deceiving groupie of "Superstar." Broadway baby that she is, Midler dips her sad songs in stagy emotion. But on "The Rose" during Friday night's show, and on "Superstar" Monday night, she cried what looked like real tears, as she struggled to regain composure and breath. When Midler performs, she surrenders to her feelings and whims, sharing them with the audience in a way few performers (Bruce Springsteen is one) have the courage to do. H er impulsiveness and affability drew many fans back for succeeding shows, and they never saw the same performance twice.
Midler knows the dangers of expecting others to coddle your delusions; she was able to give a fearless performance on film in The Rose because she wasn't afraid to play her Joplinesque character as a desperate grotesque floundering in thin air while her painstakingly knit star cocoon unraveled. But she makes it just as easy for us to laugh at our own illusions. In the second-act opener, she appeared as the washed-up (or rather, beached) lounge singer Dolores De Lago, the former "toast of Chicago." Taking the suffering-torch-singer routine to a surrealistic extreme, Midler had Dolores recovering from a "teensy-weehsy" nervous breakdown (incidentally, Dolores is a mermaid). Midler and the Harlettes (as Dolores's simple-minded sisters, Jolly, Dotty, and Dimples) whizzed around the stage in motorized wheelchairs, legs tightly encased in blue fishtails, singing a cheesy "Disco Memories" medley of "We Are Family" and "I Will Survive." In the show's most hilarious twist, Midler and the Harlettes hobbled out of their wheel chairs, keeled over onto the stage, and flopped around in Busby Berkeley formations, their waggling flippers reflected in an overhead mirror.
Midler was devilishly tart-tongued toward self-important celebrities, royalty, anyone who affects unyielding dignity. "Doesn't Jane Fonda look fabulous - well, for her age," she drawled. "Of course, she has so much riding on the fact that she looks terrific. Just between you and me, did you ever think you'd see the day when Jane Fonda embraced capitalism with such fervor? She is so 80's." Picking up an empty Pepsi can that had been left lying on one of the sets, Midler quipped, "You can tell this is Sarah Caldwell's house," as the audience howled with delight. As usual, she didn't exempt herself from the jabs. She trashed her recent flop movie, Jinxed (and its director, Don Siegel), with a scathing sabotaged film clip. The actors were dubbed in Italian, and the subtitles told a wacky plot about an evil film director named Mr. Seagull who threatened to shoot Midler because she didn't look enough like his first choice for the role, Diana Ross ("Please, Mr. Seagull, the right bra can make all the difference in the world").
The jokes were a scream, but that was to be expected; Midler's singing was the surprise treat Since her last appearance in Boston, five years ago, she has disciplined her in-concert voice. On rock numbers like "Don't Look Down," she belted rather than screeched; on ballads like "Superstar," she swooped down into velvety chest tones, where as she once talk-sang or groaned. Backed by a taut, assertive, six-man band, Midler ran through the most confident batch of songs since her selections on 1973's Bette Midler. "All I Need To Know," by Cynthia Weil, Barry Mann, and Tom Snow, was a gently rolling love ballad that she sang with uncommonly delicate soul inflections. Moon Martin's sinuous "I've Got My Eye on You" was given a menacing, seductive treatment, with Midler and the Harlettes harmonizing in humid languor. The highlight of the two shows I caught was her muscular version of the Stones' "Beast of Burden." Where Jagger got blasé, Midler got steely, infusing each provocation ("Ain't I hard enough? Ain't I rough enough? Ain't I rich enough?") with an unspoken kiss-off, spitting out the questions with a self made girl's wrath. Midler never sublimates her craving for rock the way Streisand and Ross do consequently, she reaches the most varied audience of any female entertainer today (the Opera House was a demographer's dream, with every conceivable combination of age, color, gender, and sexual preference). Although she's inflicted Barry Manilow (a music director gone berserk) and Melissa Manchester (a Harlette gone Hollywood) upon the. world, Midler remains the only showbiz interpreter who regularly covers songwriters like Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, Bob Seger, Phil Spector, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan, (She's even sung duets with the last two men, whereas Streisand and Ross prefer to slurp it up with Bany Gibb and Uonel Richie,)
In the souvenir booklet, Midler writes that De Tour was her fling with "Art as in Byron, Botticelli, Bicasso and now Bette," and accordingly, the booklet and sets are splashed with primary-color modernistic designs by Andre Miripolsky. But that didn't prepare us for the solemn detour that De Tour took in the show's final segment (after Midler had resurrected some filthy Sophie Tucker jokes, yet), a Harlette dressed as if for a futuristic production of Alice in Wonderland (white plastic mask, grayish tutu of space-traveler fabric) toe-danced a few childlike pirouettes, and some audience members around me tittered uncertainly - was this a set-up for a joke? Then Midler appeared in an elegant dolman-sleeved black silk gown over which she'd draped a flowing violet tunic - very Roman-goddess, very sophisticated, not like the usual Divine Miss M. As she sang a ponderous medley of apocalyptic tunes (Jonathan King's mid-'60s hit "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," and Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood") while holding a sparkly silver hulahoop in her outstretched arms, two Harlettes dressed in white Darth Vader masks and black bodysuits with white crescent moons affixed front and back, performed an automaton dance. The effect was that of an over ambitious high-school pageant. At one point during "Here Comes the Flood," Midler pulled her many-folded violet garment over her head and writhed in a Feifferesque gesture ("A Dance to Nuclear Annihilation").
Although she had lampooned such precious artiness earlier in the show when she performed an even ditzier Freifferesque dance to "Aht" ("Aht is a tree, and I am a fruit"), she wanted us to take her seriously this time. Doesn't she know we already do? Her fear of misplaced laughter was an incongruous - and unexpected - display of vulnerability. The stiffly self-conscious, last minute turnaround from low camp to high art risked trivializing the fun that had gone before - as if Woody Allen were to abandon his comedies in favor of "worthier" work.
Monday night, the portentous mood was snapped by a bit of closing night looniness: Midler's nine man crew ran on-stage wearing the show's gowns, wigs, fishtails, miniskirts, and bras, sending Midler onto her ass in a fit of helpless, shrieking laughter. But at Friday night's show, the medley (and the curtain-closing star turns, "Stay With Me" and "The Rose") made a rather gooey finale to a night of hard-nosed rock, shameless burlesque, and farcical bitchery. Midler left us hungering for one more joke, one more vivid, acute observation on manners in the '80s ("'The other night a friend of mine invited me to his house for an evening of Donkey Kong. I was terribly disappointed. I remember when that used to mean something. And it wasn't little and green either."), or on politics ("Boston, you are a generous town. I hear you all pitched in and gave the mayor's wife a birthday party."). When you've got a "tongue that can clip a hedge," why ballet around the bush?
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