Saturday, July 6, 2019

Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular (NBC-TV, July 4, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On July 4 I watched a double-header of two TV shows featuring musical performers and fireworks displays, the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular on NBC and the 39th annual A Capitol Fourth on PBS. Typically, the NBC show featured younger performers and the PBS show, in line with the older demographic of public broadcasting’s audience, featured older ones — though the PBS telecast had its share of young talents who’ve won contest shows like American Idol, The Voice and America’s Got Talent. NBC’s show opened with its co-host, a young female R&B singer whose name I naturally assumed was “Sierra” but is actually “Ciara,” doing a song called “One Two-Step” (a title one would more readily expect from a country song!) that would have been more fun if it had been less overproduced, starting with a chorus of four big, strapping male dancers in black-and-white costumes. One wondered where Ciara was, especially since you could hear her voice well before she was actually visible, coming in through the center of her chorus line and dressed similarly. Then the show cut to a gig with Brad Paisley doing his appealing 10-year-old song “American Saturday Night,” and then another city in which Khalid (the heavy-set but still attractive young Black male singer who does neo-soul, not rap as one might assume from his name) did something called “Out of My Head.” As far as I was concerned, by far the standout talent of this show was Maren Morris, who did two songs, “The Middle” and “The Bones.” Neither was at the level of intensity of “My Church,” her star-making hit and one of the greatest pop-soul records ever made, but both were considerably stronger than most of the rather hapless material the other performers were plowing through. 

Morris also earned points with me for the minimal physical production of her show: instead of crowding the stage with dancers and elaborate sets and props, she just stood there with her musicians and let her songs and her impassioned delivery of them make the point without all the bric-a-brac in the way. (As I’ve noted in these pages before, between them Michael Jackson and Madonna revolutionized what audiences expect from pop music shows in the 1980’s, but all too many artists have cluttered up their concerts with dancers and elaborate stage effects without the theatricality or the integrity that allowed Jackson and Madonna to put together big concert productions that were genuinely entertaining.) And would someone please cast Maren Morris in a biopic of Janis Joplin while she’s still young enough to play the part? She’s got both the looks and the vocal chops for it! The rest of the performers were appealing without being “special,” including another country star, Luke Bryan, doing a song I think was called “Sunrise, Sunshine, Sunset” (the songs were announced first, which was nice, but the announcements were barked out so quickly they were hard to make out sometimes); Derek Hough, who co-hosted the show with Ciara and did two songs (a really dull rap number called “Bad Man” and a better selection, sung instead of rapped, called “Say It Now”), Brad Paisley returning with a sappy love song to his wife called “My Miracle” (which made me wonder if he’d have to keep it in his set list if they divorce), Ciara returning with a medley of “Think About You” and “Level Up,” and Khalid taking out the musical part of the show with “Free Spirit” before the fireworks display kicked in. 

The fireworks display was accompanied by an orchestra doing the usual patriotic treacle interspersed with musical tributes to classic Hollywood — Alfred Newman’s 20th Century-Fox fanfare was played and so was the one from Warner Bros. — and the big themes from John Williams’ scores for Star Wars, E.T. and Superman. (I remember the last time Charles and I watched E.T. and how impressed I was by how dissonant and dark-sounding much of Williams’ score for the film is, and how good it is at portraying loneliness and the bitter sadness of both E.T. him/her/itself and the children E.T. befriends at their ultimate parting, but of course that’s not what got played at this concert!) The one musical highlight during the fireworks display was an unseen Jennifer Hudson singing a quite beautiful and haunting version of “Over the Rainbow” and restraining herself instead of overpowering this simple song with too many “soul” devices and ornaments the way Patti LaBelle did on her hit version in the 1980’s. Like Ray Charles in what is still my favorite non-Judy version, Hudson put a Black “spin” on the song but knew how far to take it and when to stop, and her performance was quite moving even though she was invisible to the cameras and therefore we didn’t get to see her current post-Weight Watchers physique. All in all, the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular was an O.K. show, with musical acts that appealed without shaking the rafters and sort of blended together into an exquisite dullness relieved only by Morris’s soul and passion and the quiet comfort-food aspects of the country songs.