Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to All (CBS-TV, filmed December 16, 2022; aired December 20, 2022)

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

One of this year’s biggest Christmas-themed TV specials was Merry Christmas to All by singer Mariah Carey, filmed “live” in concert at Madison Square Garden in New York December 16, 2022 and aired on CBS four nights later. Though my husband Charles was working the night it was aired, we’d seen Mariah Carey on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show a few nights before and she’d visibly and audibly bristled at being referred to as “the self-proclaimed Queen of Christmas.” Mariah Carey said that, whoever proclaimed her the “Queen of Christmas,” it wasn’t she – though her mega-hit song “All I Want for Christmas Is You” seems to have taken over from Bing Crosby’s (and Irving Berlin’s) “White Christmas” as the Christmas-themed pop song. In his introduction, Colbert also stated that at 200 million records sold, Mariah Carey is the best-selling solo artist in recording history, taking the title from Garth Brooks who in turn took it from Elvis. (But if you count all the records he’s been on, both with his former group and on his own, the biggest-selling recording artist in history is Paul McCartney.) Carey and Colbert also talked about her mixed-race ancestry: African-American (and some Venezuelan) on her father’s side and Irish-American on her mother’s – the same as the woman who to my mind is the greatest non-classical singer of all time, Billie Holiday.

The extravaganza began with a large orchestra playing a medley of “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” fromm Victor Herbert’s operetta Babes in Toyland and “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. Then Madame Mariah entered and did a version of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” with the “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” chorus from “Angels We Have Heard On High” – this process of grafting bits of songs onto other songs persisted throughout much of the evening. Mariah’s next song was “Joy to the World” – actually a medley of both songs of that title, the original carol and the one Hoyt Axton wrote for Three Dog Night in the early 1970’s. Mariah’s next two selections both paid tribute to the classic album A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records, recorded in September and October 1963 and unfortunately released on November 22, 1063, the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Carey did two tracks from the Phil Spector-produced album, Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride” as performed by the Ronettes and the one original song, Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Carey brought a lot more soul, to that song than Shania Twain had in another Christmas special Charles and I watched together – after which Charles joked that even at her current age (81), Darlene Love could have sung it better – though neither singer came close to Love’s incandescent original. Then Carey did a slightly gospel-ized version of “Silent Night” – it wasn’t as good as a straightforward presentation of the original (the way Bing Crosby did it in his extraordinary 1935 special record made as a fundraiser for a missionary project in China, and as Elvis Presley did surprisingly effectively on his first Christmas album in 1957) or an all-out gospel-soul version like Big Maybelle’s or Baby Washington’s, but it was appealing.

Then Carey brought out one of her children, daughter Monroe Cannon, for a duet on “Away In a Manger.” Just how many kids Mariah Carey has is something of a mystery; her imdb.com page lists only two, twins Monroe and Moroccan Cannon (from her second husband, Nick Cannon, to whom she was married from 2008 to 2016), but the show featured several other children and it sounded to me like she was introducing at least some of them as her offspring. Monroe Cannon has a perfectly acceptable kid’s voice but it’s not (at least yet) the stuff of which professional singing careers.The next song on the program was something else again: “Jesus Had a Mother Like Mine” sung by a young Black man named Christian, who has the makings of a great soul singer and may or may not be Mariah’s son. After Christian’s phenomenal performance, Mariah came back and did a few po- Christmas-themed ditties like “Christmas Time Is In the Air Again,” “Miss You Most at Christmas Time,” and “When Christmas Comes,” the last of which ended with a quote from “Jingle Bells.” Then came one of the most stunning performances of the evening, Mariah’s rendition of Adolphe Adam’s “O Holy Nigh t” (originally “Cantique de Noël”), in which her phenomenal range easily encompassed Adam’s high notes. Carey can still reach notes that are usually the sole province of “vapor voices,” singers like Loulie Jean Norman (whom you’ve heard even if you don’t know who she was: hers was the voice that soared wordlessly above the orchestra on the original theme from the TV series Star Trek), and Mariah used the “vapor voice” register to great effect in the last few bars of “O Holy Night.”

Afterwards, though, the quality level of the show fell drastically: a band including her kids came out and did something called “Christmas Is Coming,” followed by a novelty number from Mariah herself called “O Santa.” The next song was absolutely dreadful: an extended medley of “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane” and “Up on the Housetop” featuring a bunch of aggressively untalented rappers, of whom the only one whose name I caught (like a disease) was “Slick Rick,” that ended with a paean to Mariah Careh’s hairdressers. (In the immortal words of Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know!”) After the blessed ending of that number Mariah made a bizarre apology for the fact that she was about to sing non-Christmas songs – she said she won’t allow anything but Christmas music to be played in her home from the end of Thanksgivng until New Year’s Day , but she honored her fans’ desire for a medley of her hits. I missed the titles of the first few songs on the medley – they sounded like “Magic,” “We Will Be Driving,” and “Sweet Fantasy” – but the rest of the titles I was able to get from the chyrons. They were “Heartbreaker” (a perfectly decent pop song but hardly in the same league as the previous “Heartbreaker” songs by the Rolling Stones and especially Dolly Parton), “My All,” “It’s Like That,” “Emotions,” “Make It Happen,” and “Fly Like a Bird.” After the medley she did two more non-Christmas songs from her catalog, “We Belong Together” and “Hero,” justifying the latter by saying she thought it had enough of an inspirational message to be appropriate for the holidays.

The finale was the inevitable “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” sung by Mariah Carey with the special’s various cast members, as well as some people in the parking lot after the show ended giving forth with their own strictly amateur versions. The outro featured post-show interviews with some of the fans, who seemed to describe the concert as if it were a religious experience, and one male audience member even wore a T-shirt with the absurd legend, “Mariah Carey Invented Christmas.” While I was writing the above I was listening to a YouTube stream of Mariah Carey’s Christmas recordings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37uWgeaGzvI), and judging from this post she may be one of those artists who actually does better in the recording studio than she does “live.” The studio versions of some of these songs, like “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World,” seemed stronger and more soulful than the concert renditions, and the Carey Christmas albums include some songs, like “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” (another nod to the Phil Spector Christmas album and the version therein by The Crystals), that would have improved the concert immensely if she’d performed them. One of the biggest surprises of the YouTube post is an all-out gospel number, “Jesus, Oh What a Wonderful Child,” which suggests Mariah Carey could become a great gospel singer. Ironically, through much of the night I’d been faulting her for trying to add gospel and soul vocal inflections to songs that didn’t really support them – I found myself thinking, “Mariah, you have a great pop voice, but don’t try to be Mahalia Jackson or Aretha Franklin” – but when I heard “Jesus, Oh What a Wonderful Child” I found myself astonished at the sheer power and fervor of her rendition and wishing she’d make a full-fledged gospel album the way Aretha did in 1972 with Amazing Grace.