Tuesday 16 December 2014

Mariah overdoes herself at Beacon Theatre show

Mariah Carey needed to redeem herself at her Beacon Theatre show Monday - badly. Just over a week ago, the singer lobbed a lump of coal into the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree-lighting ceremony by offering a hacking, pitchy and hoarse performance of "All I Want for Christmas Is You". A clip of her vocal drew more comment on social media than Rene Zellweger's face, and its placement on YouTube continues to be a source of delight for sadists the world over.

The Beacon display gave Carey the chance for a direct do-over, as it represented the first full Christmas-themed show of the singer's career. (Five like-minded concerts continue at the Upper West Side venue, scattered over the next week.) From the start of the show, Carey seemed hell-bent on proving something. She opened with a nearly unadorned vocal on "Hark The Herald Angels Sing", the better to throw attention squarely on her instrument.

But fate had other plans. For the first three numbers, her miking device and earpiece weren't working correctly, throwing her off pitch and breaking up her phrasing. The fault wasn't entirely technical. Carey seemed nervous and out-of-breath, not just at the start of the show, but throughout. Her patter bordered on blather, with sentences trailing off and introductions going nowhere.

During certain stretches, she rallied, sometimes heroically. The result gave the show a strangely wavering tone, shifting constantly between bravura exclamations and squirm-inducing excess. Though the concert wasn't long - just 80 minutes - the night didn't stint on theatrics. It featured a cast of nearly 40, including a little girl performing "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies", a ballet troupe, a prancing snow man, a gospel choir, a clutch of carolers, several acrobats and a hyperactive round of kid singer/dancers. The creamy white stage, framed by giant snowflakes and featuring a huge Christmas tree, looked properly elegant.

If only the music came together as cleanly. Once Carey got her miking fixed, it became clear the problem wasn't so much what notes she could hit but how she chose to navigate them. She isolated nearly every phrase, ruining any sense of sensuality and turning the rhythm of the songs static. She would scat around aimlessly, then land on notes as if they were life rafts she had to cling to for dear life. Often, she filled the space by stoking her career-long love of melismas. It wasn't enough for Carey to tack 100 elaborations onto a melody. She had to go for 200. Her flutters during the jazzy "Charlie Brown Christmas Theme" may have set a world record.

There were issues too with the arrangements of the music. The set drew from Carey's two Santa-centric albums. The first, "Merry Christmas", released a full twenty years ago, sold over 5 million copies, making it one of the top moving stocking stuffers of all time. It contained the original "All I Want for Christmas", a neo-Phil Spector-style gem which became something of a seasonal classic. Carey followed that with 2010's "Merry Christmas II You", which sold over 500,000 copies - not bad for its era of diminished sales expectations.

True to those albums, some of the arrangements here had the tackiness of Christmas sweaters. "Here Comes Santa Claus" boasted a fat-footed disco beat. "Silent Night" never sounded sludgier.

Near the end of the show, Carey broke with the holiday theme to offer her old hit "Hero". It provided one of the few vehicles that set the star at ease. She sailed between notes, rather than jerking through them fitfully. To be sure, even the most random parts of the night had a strange allure. By alternating between camp fun and kitsch overkill, the night became one for the record books, a diva indulgence we won't soon forget.

(New York Daily News)



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