An Evening with Dua Lipa (Radical22, Fulwell 73, CBS-TV, aired December 15, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 15), my husband Charles and I watched An Evening with Dua Lipa, a music special on CBS featuring Albanian-British baby diva Dua Lipa performing with a symphony orchestra called the “Heritage Orchestra” (probably a pickup band assembled from the quite stellar coterie of classically trained musicians in London) on some of her greatest hits. This marked an interesting contrast to the PBS special we’d just seen with the Violent Femmes performing with the Milwaukee Symphony because Dua Lipa’s music benefited a lot more from the use of orchestral instruments than the Violent Femmes’ did. Before last night’s show, I’d pretty much relegated Dua Lipa to the rather anonymous pool of female pop singers with small, lithe bodies and small, tight voices that are clogging up the music charts these days. I was also confused by her name because it took me literally years to realize that she’s just one person: I was thrown by the usual meaning of the syllable “Dua” or its derivatives and thought she was a duo. (Charles tells me “dua” is “two” in Esperanto.) Dua Lipa is actually her legal name – her parents, Dukagjin Lipa and Anesa Rexha Lipa, fled from war-torn Pristina in the former Yugoslavian republic of Kosovo and settled in London, where Dua was born on August 22, 1995 – and according to her imdb.com page she was teased about it as a child but when she grew up and realized she had the vocal chops to become a singer, she embraced it because it was sufficiently distinctive she wouldn’t have to adopt a stage name. She has two siblings, a sister named Rina and a brother named Gjin, both of whom were introduced on the show. Through an hour-and-a-half time slot, less the predictable avalanche of commercials (Charles joked that this was making PBS look better than ever), Dua Lipa performed 10 songs: “Houdini,” “Levitating,” “Maria,” “Training Season,” “These Walls,” “Love Again,” “Illusion,” “Cold Heart” (a duet with Elton John – more on that later), “Be the One,” and “Dance the Night.” All were in medium-tempo dance grooves but at least weren’t relentlessly ugly, like so many so-called “EDM” (“electronic dance music”) songs these days.

Dua Lipa has a much more flexible and technically accomplished voice than most of the singers in this genre, and at times – notably the slow introduction to “Maria,” in which the singer lamented her partner’s continued attachment to his ex – she showed at least some instinct for phrasing. Among dance divas, the late Donna Summer and the living Lady Gaga had/have the most skill at phrasing – the variations in tempo and rhythm that in the hands of a master singer really make a song come alive – and one of my hopes for Dua Lipa would be that she falls into the hands of a master singer and does a standards album the way Lady Gaga did with Tony Bennett for two marvelous standards albums before he passed. “Maria” in particular sounded like the late Scott Walker’s pop material from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s before he branched off into synth-driven weirdness (though he remained a powerful artist even at his most experimental), and though I wouldn’t say it was the best song she did all night, it was the one that suggested the most possibilities for Dua Lipa’s future growth as an artist. She gave the concert in the Royal Albert Hall, but did it theatre-in-the-round style, putting seats on what’s usually the front stage and seemingly taking out most of the ground-floor seats to make room for a circular stage with curved runways. On one song she marched in a whole crew of backing singers that looked big enough to form a Special Forces commando team, though she mostly used the long runways for her own dance steps. (I’ve often commented in these pages that the huge success of Michael Jackson and Madonna in the mid-1980’s changed audience expectations of pop-music concerts forever. Before that, singers like Frank Sinatra could just stand in front of an orchestra and sing; now people expect singers to dance as well and put on a large production.)

At least Dua Lipa wore only two outfits during the entire show – a red number at the beginning (a full-length gown, albeit with a slit down the side so she could show her legs) and a black one at the end – instead of doing multiple costume changes. She made the change at the point where Elton John came on for their duet on a song called “Cold Heart” which they recorded together, and on which he interpolated a bit of his classic “Rocket Man.” This would have been all well and good if Elton John still had a voice; it was never all that great (he became a huge star on the quality of his songs and a serviceable, if not truly great, voice that could sing them effectively) but decades of physical and vocal abuse have cost him virtually all of the voice he ever had. (I used the Google song search app to get the names of the various songs, and on one of them, “Levitating,” Google said she had a guest star, a Black rapper named DaBaby, but I didn’t notice anyone like that on the actual telecast.) The orchestra included a full-sized saxophone section – one reason I suspect it was a pickup band rather than an established symphony like the one in Milwaukee that backed the Violent Femmes, with the saxophonists plucked from the pop or jazz session musicians around London – and the conductor was rather quickly identified as Ben Paulson (though that could be wrong). I got really annoyed with the director, Paul Dugdale, because I’d have liked to see more of one of her two guitarists, mainly because they looked gender-ambiguous (clean-shaven, flat-chested, with major amounts of jewelry dangling from their ears); I’m guessing from the preponderance of evidence that they’re female but it would have been nice to see enough of them to tell which gender they were. Instead Dugdale kept cutting away from the gender-ambiguous guitarist after glimpses of just a second or two. I came away from this show with a lot more respect for Dua Lipa as an artist than I’d had when I went in, though I also hope she can and will broaden her musical horizons the way Lady Gaga has and move on from dance music to show off more of her real vocal skills.