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.
