Olivia Great, No Thanks To Her Friends
By Jeani Read
Olivia Newton-John was so very precisely what I had expected her to be that her performance at the Queen Elizabeth Tuesday night was more than a little disconcerting, as if I had had some kind of sneak preview before the fact.
Not that my powers of premonition have a particularly good track record; it’s just that Olivia has maintained such a consistent and predictable image of herself in her comparatively short career as a star that it is probably impossible to feel you don’t already know her.
She is a sunny-haired, sunny-smiling ingenue, part Goldie Hawn silliness and part shampoo-ad softness, prettily engaging and very earnest. And she has, even acknowledging the occasional fluffed note, an excellent voice, pure, free and remarkably true to her recorded work, capable of swift changes from wistful fragility to powerful assurance.
Olivia put in a highly creditable showing Tuesday, and I say Olivia be-cause almost none of the credit could possibly go to her six-piece backing group who muffed and fumbled their way through the set, harmonizing in anguished tones. The concert succeeded only because of Olivia herself, in spite of the band, and no amount of explanations of lost and borrowed instruments was enough to excuse them. As a unit, they are billed as Olivia and Friends, but I wonder about that. Still reading charts for the simple arrangements, they sounded as if she had met them on the plane coming up here.
Her material is catchy, light, safe and sublimely middle-of-the-road, varied nicely among country and ballad and gospel flavors, and paced with smooth efficiency. If none of it, including her hits Let Me Be There; If Not For You; If You Love Me; I Honestly Love You is something you would care to dwell on at great length, it was still very nice while it lasted.
Opening for Olivia was local singer-songwriter Alexis who, suffice it to say, was having a rather poor night, surprisingly enough, and failed to interest an otherwise amiable audience.