The 76-year-old crooner turned back the clock for a show filled with jingle-worthy melodies, supper-club showmanship and little personal revelation.
from the New York Post’s Page Six that said Manilow was furious at his manager for booking a three-week Broadway engagement this summer.
The picture that emerges, four years after what Manilow described with excitement as his final tour, is of a guy now putting on his bedazzled lion tamer’s jacket just to punch the clock.Yet if he’s truly miserable up there, he did an exemplary job of hiding it during Friday’s show, a crisply paced survey of his splashiest and schmaltziest hits — the pleading “Mandy” as well as the campy “Copacabana ” — in which he was backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Part of his work, as Manilow seems to understand it, is pointing out the perceived shortcomings of his successors on the pop chart. Not long into the concert, he bemoaned the fact that “today’s radio has no melody” — an absurd position, of course, but all the motivation he needed to haul out the undeniably tuneful “Looks Like We Made It,” whose seamless blend of crooner-era theatrics and plush adult-contemporary sonics offered a reminder of how emotionally legible love songs used to be.
As a counterculture refusenik, he also seemed to want to defend against the hippie-centric idea that pop is cheapened by its commercialism.
The drawback to Manilow’s coolly effective professionalism was that it left you unsure of his personal investment in his music. We’ve been trained to think of pop songs as illuminating singers’ inner lives, but here it was anyone’s guess if “Even Now” or “I Made It Through the Rain,” both delivered in a voice only slightly less creamy than in his heyday, still touch anything like a nerve.
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