Physical But Too Clinical
Pelt me with sweat bands if you must, but all the video clips in ‘Countdown’ will not convince me that dairy-fresh, born-again jogger Olivia Newton-John is the seductive performer her marketing board would have us believe.
She has a voice pleasant enough for technology to improve, seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm as a dancer, and an evident sense of humor. And, of course, those stunning young-Doris Day looks. But, despite all the attempts to transform the girl next door into an erotic singing gym mistress, there is an antiseptic chill in the act that makes her about as sexy as Marie Osmond without the ring of confidence.
Watching her play the siren on stage is like watching Cliff Richard pretend to be a mean rock ‘n’ roller; the result is just not credible. It can be amusing, and there is nothing wrong with that, but somehow I think the publicity machine expects us to take the gyrations a lot more seriously.
Anyway, tonight we are given the chance to see more of her new “raunchiness” in a two-hour special called ‘Olivia Newton-John in Concert’ (Channel 7, at 7.30).
Most of the show is taken from two live concerts filmed at the 14,000-seat Weber State University Hall in Ogden, Utah. The home State of the Osmonds was apparently selected because it was the only one in the US to ban Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Physical’.
Channel 7, displaying the sort of subtlety made famous by its ‘World of Sport’ team has, popped in Olivia’s one-time boy-friend Ian Turpie of ‘The New Price is Right’ to act as host. He doesn’t tell us a great deal about the good old days, but he reads a cue card well, looks clean, and acts friendly.
(Oh, just one warning. The concert part of the programme runs for about 11½ hours and Turpie then encourages you to stay around through much old film to catch the first screening of a $75,000 video clip of Olivia’s latest single, ‘Tied Up (In Promises)’. It’s an anti-climax hardly worth waiting for.)
The “concert”, with its myriad special effects from director Brian Grant, is impressive. Grant filmed with eight cam-eras; he also used a 24-track mobile recording unit for stereo and it is being presented tonight as a simulcast with 3FOX FM.
… It opens with an overture and photographic stills, and then it’s into the laser lighting, the dry-ice fumes and glittering rain … and Olivia. She sings oldies like the country-flavored ‘Jolene’, ‘I Honestly Love You’, and ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’ and more recent numbers, ‘Xanadu’, ‘Heart Attack’ and the big finale ‘Physical’.
There is a good deal of hamming it up for the cameras in the ‘Grease’ hit ‘You’re the One That I Want’, and in ‘Physical’. Grant includes so many instant replays that the show begins to take on the flavor of World Series Pop Music (“let’s see that pirouette again, Richie”). We certainly catch a lot more than those in the Utah audience.
Olivia’s 10-man band, led by Tom Scott, a superb saxophonist, provides an excellent backing. The music is splendidly mixed. Occasionally Scott threatens to soar away with the show, and occasionally you wish he would.
So it sounds and looks good and the star, with her new Jeff Thomson coiffure, looks fit enough to sell any sport. But a siren? Not unless you have a vivid imagination …