by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Sunday, December 22, out of all the holiday-themed music
specials out there this Christmas season the one I ended up watching was what
was billed as the 22nd anniversary presentation of A Home for the
Holidays. Produced by the Dave Thomas
Foundation (Dave Thomas is the owner of Wendy’s, which I regard as one of the
better fast-food outlets but my husband Charles won’t eat there because Thomas
was reportedly a major donor to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign) and
CBS-TV, A Home for the Holidays
is — I kid you not — an annual infomercial for adoption. I remember catching
this show years ago when it was hosted by Mariah Carey (ya remember Mariah
Carey? Her downfall as a superstar abruptly
came in 2001, when she starred in a film called Glitter that was such a mega-flop that after the 9/11
attacks Jay Leno joked, “They say that terrorists hide out in places where no
one else goes. So that means they should be looking for Osama bin Laden in the
theatres that are showing Mariah Carey’s movie Glitter”). This year the show was hosted by someone I
consider a far better singer than Carey ever was: Idina Menzel, who burst onto
the cultural radar six years ago when she was a voice double in the film Frozen and electrified audiences all over the world with
her song “Let It Go.” (When Charles and I finally caught up with Frozen I was startled that this great song was sung by the
story’s principal villainess and was an inspirational ode to the most terrible
thing she does all movie: freezing out her home village so everyone there ends
up cold and starving.)
Menzel just put out a holiday CD called Christmas
— A Season of Love that is a majestic
showcase for one of the most amazing voices in current popular music; she seems
to be able to sing just about anything — rock, pop, Broadway and even jazz
(judging from the swinging version of “Sleigh Ride” which opens the CD). Menzel
sang four songs on the show, three of which were from her Christmas CD: the one
that wasn’t was a brief a cappella
version of “Let It Go” sung with a girl named Rose whom she picked out of the
audience. She opened with “We Need a Little Christmas Now” from the musical Mame (the song that appears during the dark time in
Mame’s fortunes when she’s lost her money due to the Depression, only to get it
back when she marries a super-rich Texas oilman and he then dies in a freak
accident, leaving her a wealthy widow), and she closed the show with a song I
would have assumed was called “525,600 Minutes” but whose real name is “Seasons
of Love.” In between she sang a song called “At This Table” which fit in
perfectly with the theme of the show — and its interstital segments featuring
happy adoptees and their adoptive parents, including one brother and sister who
were adopted jointly from the foster-care system (we were told they were brother and sister, anyway, though their
body language seemed to be heading just a bit too close to Die
Walküre territory for my comfort) — a
beautiful song about people being welcome at this table and being accepted for
who they are. It was inspirational without being sappy — always a tightrope for both songwriters and singers trying
their hands at this sort of material — and while it underscored the show’s
message urging potential parents to take in foster-care children and give them stable
homes and love, it transcended it and communicated a beautiful message of
arms-outstretched acceptance we especially need to hear in such vile times as
these, when the U.S. is run by a man (quite a few men, actually) who pride
themselves on lacking empathy, compassion and any thought of welcoming the
stranger.
There were other singers on the show but Menzel totally outshined
them. One was Ne-Yo, yet another of those Black entertainers who I assume from
their stage name would be a rapper but isn’t, doing a good cover of Smokey
Robinson and the Miracles’ song “This Christmas” — not as good as the original,
but still quite capable and enjoyable. Another was Kelly Rowland, doing her hit
“I Love You More at Christmastime” — I wouldn’t have thought from the voice on
the record that she’s Black, but she is, and she did a nice entrance through the audience, shaking the hands of the kids as she
made her way to the stage. There was also Adam Lambert, the openly Gay
near-winner of American Idol who
made his first album in a dance-pop vein because to the music industry’s
Pavlov-conditioned producers, “Gay = dance-pop.” He doesn’t have that kind of
voice, and he’s proven what he can
do by joining the surviving members of Queen in their tours to promote (and
suck off the group’s increased popularity from) Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of their late lead singer Freddie
Mercury. Here his song was “Whatever Gets Me Closer to You,” an O.K. pop ballad
that didn’t give the (far more interesting) rock side of Lambert’s voice much
of a workout. Whatever my problems with A Home for the Holidays as a concept, it was great to hear Idina Menzel sing
her heart out on three songs; I remember hearing her do “Let It Go” on the 2014
Academy Awards (and I recall her version there as, if anything, even more
impassioned than the one she sang in the film!) and thinking that now we had
the perfect person to star in a biopic of Janis Joplin — only since then I’ve
heard another modern singer, Maren Morris, who’d be even better! So would someone
please make that movie already?
