Filming of Olivia in concert
By Rosanne Pagano, Standard-Examiner Staff
Olivia Newton-John was patient. She waited out the monotonous sound checks, as stage hands repeated “Test, test, one, two, into the tangle of microphones set up Tuesday on the circular Dee Events Center stage.
She talked to her piano man,joked with the guitar players and waited some more while a small squad of off-duty Los Angeles policemen, her private bodyguards, passed random glances over the aisles of empty purple-and-red seats.
“Olivia Newton-John travels with her own bodyguards”,” someone asked. “She gets threats, you know,” one of her managers said.
Ms. Newton-John, keeping the final engagements of her 1982 North American tour, was preparing to play Ogden.
The concert marked the singer’s first trip to Utah, the only state in the country where her double-meaning-packed song. “Physical” was banned by a radio station.
If the censoring bothered her, it never showed.
The singer, said to have a cold, burned through a half-dozen songs, four of them gold records, in the first 30 minutes of the show.
She seemed to like her work. The audience loved it.
As she took to the stage, a smiling Ms. Newton-John shouted, “Hello, Utah!”
And the on-their-feet crowd roared back a warm hello. Two hours late, the concert had begun.
This was a special date added by promoters so that a British film company, hired by the singer, could tape the concert for television distribution on Home Box Office.
The 40-member crew had spent more than a day installing a ring of 140 lights (so so t the audience could be filmed), wiring the stage and setting up taping equipment.
Three hours before showtime, director Brian Grant sat in the audience, his knees resting on the seat in front of him, his eyes glued to the stage.
During the show from a van parked outside, Grant will tell the camera on the floor what to shoot and when. He has seen eight Olivia Newton-John concerts in the past three months. He can replay like an album track in his mind the singer’s act beginning to end.
“The show doesn’t vary, whether you see it in San Francisco or Buffalo, another director said. “The only difference in tonight’s version will be the cameras on stage.” he added.
“Some people ask us why we’re filming in Ogden,” said Brian Grant, “why not L.A. or New York?” (home bases of many of the crew.)
“Well, we didn’t want that Hollywood Bowl crowd,” said the London-born Grant, taking a drag on his Mariboro cigarette.
“We wanted the audience to seem right on top of her,” he added, convinced the Dee Events Center relatively small size would give him the atmosphere he sought.
But now it was only about 6 p.m., still an hour before fans would begin lining up in the cold night air, tickets in their hands and their hands jammed into the pockets of fur-collared winter coats.
Inside, Ms. Newton-John sat cross legged on the stage in the 13,000-seat events center. It was cold. The singer layered a knee-length sweater over her tight aqua-colored pants and white T shirt.
Members of the hand hugged her. Someone else kissed her. Finally, after waiting through lighting cheeks, still more sound tests and running through her platinum record “You’re the One that I Want,” Olivia Newton-John went backstage for make-up.
By 7 p.m. the crowd of about 5,500 had begun to trickle in. There were clear skinned high school students, Olivia head bands circling their heads. College men came with their dates, some in brightly colored mini skirts with eye make-up to match.
Parents came with children. “Do I think this show is too sеxу for my kids,” said one mother, aware of Olivia Newton-John’s marketing change from whole some girl-next-door to soft-core punkette. “I don’t think they get it, even if the songs are sexy,” she said of her daughters, ages seven and 10.
After a 45-minute jazz session, the increasingly restless crowd was pacified with vintage Beatles songs until after 10p.m. The video crew seemed ready, Brian Grant had vanished from the main Door.
The crowd groaned as yet another Beatles song came aver the speakers. Nearly four hours after she arrived at the hall, and two hours after the show was scheduled to start, pop star Olivia Newton-Jobs started singing.
For the true Olivia fan, neither the necessarily obtrusive cameras, nor the delay seemed to dull the sensation of seeing the singer in person.
“This is a perfect sight to come see her.” said one fan “It’s being taped for TV, right?! figure it’s got to be near perfect”
More from Physical Live - Olivia’s Utah Physical concert filmed for TV and video release.