Olivia's lovely whether in leather or lace
No matter how much Olivia Newton-John teases her hair or how many black sequins she dons, the pretty blonde from Australia still looks like a sweet, little pixie. And she does don sequins. For “Olivia Newton-John in Concert” HBO this week, she wears a new punk hairstyle and a splashy, glittering mini skirt as she skips across the stage.
A photo essay at the beginning of the HBO special, which portrays Miss Newton John from toddler to teenager to the days of “Grease” and getting physical, tries to convince us of her new sophisticated image and indeed, the winning smile seems to be getting sexier and the outfits hotter with each passing year.
Yet as soon as she says “Hello, Ogden”, somewhat perkily to her eager Utah audience in this concert, she again seems every bit the pony-tailed Sandy she played opposite John Travolta.
But the full, beautiful voice is the same. Miss Newton-John sings “Please, Mister. Please” “Xanadu” “Heart Attack”, “Physical”, “I Honestly Love You,” “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” “You’re the One that I Want,” “Magic,” “Jolene” and other songs in the 90-minute special which was videotaped toward the end of her recent 50-city American tour.
The producers seem to have taken great pains to keep this special far from the boredom that burdens other concerts filmed - special effects and unusual photographic techniques are employed at great length, splitting the screen sometimes in half, sometimes in thirds, sometimes horizontally, sometimes diagonally, sometimes vertically. Freeze frames and fade-ins are used alongside trick photography to keep the viewer interested even though he can’t feel the same electricity felt by the actual audience at a concert.
While all this has the effect, of rendering the concert less real and live for the at home viewer it is obviously more slickly packaged than spontaneous it does circumvent the potential boredom.
Olivia Newton John in Concert plays Feb 1,4,7,10 and 13 on HBO
By Debra Morgenstern Katz
More from Olivia’s 1982 live Physical concert in Utah.