Olivia Newton-John Conveys Her Niceness - concert review
Olivia Newton-John Conveys Her Niceness
All performers are fantasy objects for their fans, but why America’s apparent need for a female pop singer who blends images of the crinolined, antebellum South with the buoyancy of a modern day Texas cheerleader should be fulfilled by somebody from England by way of Australia remains one of life’s minor mysteries
Still, there was Olivia Newton-John on Sunday night making her New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera with a stage-full of musicians and hanging greenery and a sell out crowd of 4,000 busily memorializing the occasion with a panoply of Instamatics.
Miss Newton-John, with her eternally smiling face, her repertory of superslick countryish songs, and her thin little voice, has aroused annoyance in two camps - Nashville regulars resent her success on the country charts, given her obvious lack of the proper “roots.” And rock critics generally slight her dismissively as a light-weight bit of fluff.
Both complaints are in a sense correct, but irrelevant. Country music in Nashville itself is mostly far removed from back-porch picking: it’s a musical style by now independent of the social antecedents of its practitioners. And the fact that Miss Newton-John deals in the fluffy superficialities of pop is not in itself a fault: the question is how well she does it.
To this taste, she does it pretty well but not outstandingly as, say, Abba or Toni Tennille or Neil Sedaka do. Miss Newton-John’s soprano isn’t as negligible as some think: There’s a nice husky quiver to it, and only at full volume does it turn shrill. But at the same time it’s pretty colorless, and she isn’t much as a stylist.
Particularly when she moved beyond her comfortable stylistic range, things turned downright embarrassing in periodic attempts at a sort of jazzy, scatting ornamentation, or especially when she sabotaged simple, haunted songs with kitschy arrangements - “Greensleeves,” “Jolene.”
But most of the time she was pleasant enough, when you take the whole package into account. Her basic group, her backup singers and the large orchestra worked smoothly and slickly behind her.
And her own manner seemed just right for the material; she really succeeds in projecting her, image, and as a result her demonstrable niceness buoys up her minimal art. At the end, in the pure actressy pop of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” from “Evita” she came very, very close to being genuinely moving.