An Audience with Adele (fulfill TV, NBC-TV, produced 2021, aired March 20, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I wanted to watch the NBC-TV special An Audience with Adele, thinking a) it would be on at 8 p.m. and b) it would be a simple Adele concert special with her singing 20 songs over the telecast time slot. In fact it was on at 9 p.m. (I filled in the hour between by watching a Meloni-era Law and Order: Special Victims Unit rerun on the USA Channel) and it was “an audience with Adele” in both senses of the term. The crowd was filled with other celebrities, including Samuel L. Jackson, Idris Elba and Emma Thompsun, and Adele called on them to ask her questions which she answered in crushingly banal terms. What’s more, NBC decided to use this show as a mega-promo for tonight’s premiere of the American Song Contest, a new show of their own patterned on the Eurovision Song Contest with up-and-comers from each state competing with people on the way down, including Michael Bolton from Connecticut and Jewel representing, of all states, Alaska. (Jewel is her actual first name; she was born Jewel Kilcher in Payson, Utah but her family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska shortly after she was born on May 23, 1974. The family were originally Mormons but stopped attending the church after her parents divorced.)

Between the long interactions Adele had with fellow celebrities in the audience, the promos for American Song Contest that made me feel like I was being bludgeoned to death with the insistence that I watch that show (it premieres tonight) and the other commercials, Adele only got to sing nine songs over a two-hour time slot. This was one song fewer than she got in her Adele: One Night Only concert special last November, which promised us an interview with Adele by Oprah Winfrey as well as a concert special, and which I’d assumed would be a short interview segment followed by a full concert. Instead it was a bunch of cut-up interview segments interspersed between Adele’s songs. I had thought An Audience with Adele would be simply a concert special without all the frou-frou that got dragged in between the songs. My first clue was when they broke for commercials after Adele had sung just one song – the usual norm for a show like this on commercial TV was at least two songs between each commercial interruption.

I still love Adele; I fell in love with her on one of the awards shows and I realized she is a “woman of size,” as the current euphemism goes, and she’s not averse to showing that off. At a time when other female singers feel compelled to starve themselves to the dimensions of a concentration-camp survivor, it’s nice to see Adele unafraid to show off her weight in public. What’s more, she performs with little or no “production”: no Cirque du Soleil performers, no armies of choristers, no quasi-fascistic dance formations behind her (when I’ve seen Beyoncé’s videos I’ve joked that they look like they were directed by the love child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl, and I still haven’t forgotten the video Janet Jackson did years ago for the song “Rhythm Nation” that looked like Metropolis: The Musical): just a formally but plainly dressed woman standing on stage with no one but her backup musicians and singers belting her heart out. If there’s a flaw with Adele it’s monotony: so many of her songs are about the miseries of relationships gone wrong that at one point I said that I wished the Gay & Lesbian Times were still around doing their “Unlikely New Year’s Predictions” so I could do one about Adele: “This year Adele will write and record a song about a relationship that is actually working.”

I like Adele precisely because she’s a new singer whose stage act (or lack thereof) hearkens back to the divas of old: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Judy Garland. She mentioned Barbra Streisand as one of her role models, and the similarities are there, particularly in the purity of their voices and their ability to hit high notes without screeching and within a musical context. But all the things I like about Adele got sidetracked – as they had last November as well – by the things I didn’t. She likes to do the same sort of “tea break” with which Frank Sinatra used to interrupt his Las Vegas shows and tell unfunny “jokes.” She’s also not an especially compelling personality when she isn’t singing; her attempts to make herself “relatable” to the audience fell pretty much flat. The concert’s promoters seemed undecided whether to make Adele seem like an incomparable diva or like jes’ plain folks, and they came up with an uneasy mix of both.