Olivia wows SPAC crowd
By Bill Rice
Entertainment at the Saratoga Fair opened with three performances by a singer almost too talented and pretty to be real, Olivia Newton-John - The Grammy Award winner from England, who could have been dropped in from a Pepsi generation commercial, drew an estimated 15,200 fans for her opening show Friday night. 14,800 to her Saturday afternoon performance and 17,500 Saturday evening.
Olivia Newton-John took thet audience by storm and, in many cases, I think, by surprise. Most people expected a E singer, but few expected such a C seasoned and versatile entertainer. She kept the audience in the pocket of her neatly tailored blue-jeans with her own enthusiasm as she sang, skipped, strutted, pranced and marched back and forth across) the stage.
She didn’t even lose the young people in the audience when she sang a song for “the mums and dads in the audience, ‘Nevertheless (I’m in Love With You).”
If Olivia had been born 20 years earlier she could have been a gas with the big bands, and she can sing razzamatazz show tunes well enough to have been a star on Broadway. She certainly has much more voice than her recordings would lead you to believe.
She also has showmanship. Anyone who can sing “You Are My Sunshine” in in this day and age and have the better part of 17,000 people singing and clapping along with her, has to be doing something right.
She started the show off with “Let Me Be There.” a song in the country style for which she is best known. She closed with her breathy rendition of “Have You Ever Been Mellow.”
In between she sang a variety of things including “Follow Me,” “The Air That I Breath.” “Country Girl,” “Please Mr. Please,” “By the Banks of the Ohio, “The River’s Too Wide,” “If You Love Me, Let Me Know” and “I Honestly Love You” (her Grammy winner).
Her fans loved every minute of it and before she left the stand she was given enough stuffed animals from those in front to open her own stand on the midway.