The Voice Christmas Special (Warner Horizon, ITV, NBC-TV, aired December 3, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night NBC showed an unexpectedly interesting special of Christmas-themed music as oart if their so-called “reality” show The Voice, a singing competition in which established vocal stars basically have battles with each other over the fates of young, unknown contestants. Of course the so-called “coaches” of the new talents -- the established stars who provide the main reason anyone would want to watch this preposterous program (I’ve never seen a regular episode of The Voice but NBC’s relentless promos are enough to give me the idea) -- perform on their own. The Voice’s Christmas show was basically an assemblage of clips from previous seasons of the show and featured not only this year’s “coaches” -- the repulsive Blake Shelton (his voice isn’t bad but his overall personality and demeanor is so bizarrely offensive I can’t imagine how he’s got two far sexier, more charismatic and more powerful talents, his ex-wife Miranda Lambert and his current “squeeze” Gwen Stefani, to fall in love with him -- “He must have a big dick,” my husband Charles said when I told him that once), Adam Levine and Pharrell Williams (who was blessedly shown bare-headed without one of those weird hats that have become his trademark) -- but people who’ve been on the show before.

The clips were excerpts from various seasons of the show, ranging from the third to the 17th (I’m amazed that this thing has been on that long!) and began with the current quartet of “coaches” doing a respectable job on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” While Judy Garland, for whom this song was written -- she introduced it in the film Meet Me in St. Louis -- remains the undisputed champion of it, the four acquitted themselves nicely and certainly did more justice to the song than the Radio City Rockettes had in another NBC “clip” show aired the night before. The next song was Charles Brown’s 1947 novelty Christmas hit, “Merry Christmas, Baby,” which has been subjected to innumerable covers (including a second version by Brown himself from 1956 that I think is even better than his original, and one by Chuck Berry that recalls his early apprenticeship covering the R&B hits of the 1940’s in bar bands before he made it on his own in 1955 with “Maybelline,” a spoof of country music Berry intended as the B-side of his first record but became an enormous hit). This was a duet between John Legend and The Voice contestant Katie Ludden, who turned out to be a buxom, big-breasted white blues shouter who reminded me of Ottillie Patterson, the wife and vocalist for 1950’s British “trad” (Dixieland jazz) star Chris Barber, who used to come out in silly-looking 1890’s outfits and belt out Bessie Smith covers and other items from the Dixieland songbook. She was quite effective in the song and she inspired Legend to give one of the most powerful performances I’ve seen him do, too; usually I like Legend on ballads but he just sounds dutiful and dull on faster, harder-rocking songs. Not this time: though he sped up the tempo from Charles Brown’s original ballad-blues version midway through the song, he did quite effective “soul” vocal moves and sounded more impassioned than just about anything I’ve heard from him aside from the Academy Award-winning theme song from Ava DuVernay’s great film about the 1965 civil rights movement, Selma.

After that number came a hideous mismatch between singer and song: The Voice producers decided to revive Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home,” the most famous track from the 1963 Christmas album produced by Phil Spector, and the orchestral arrangement came about as close to Spector’s fabled “Wall of Sound” than one could expect in a live performance. But the singer was Michael Buble, whom I ordinarily like (especially when he performs songs from the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s in a fine, comfortable voice that reassures me there will still be someone around who can perform this material once Tony Bennett finally croaks) but was wretchedly unsuited for that particular song. After that came the first Christmas song on the program with religious or spiritual content: “O Holy Night,” in a duet between Jennifer Hudson and Kelly Clarkson. I kept expecting Hudson’s Black-church-trained vocal cords to run all over Clarkson, but the two actually kept quite close and brought a lot of soul to this song without overpowering it as some rock or soul artists have done trying to cover it (though Enrico Caruso’s 1917 recording remains by far the best account of this piece). Then came Jose Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad” -- not one of my favorite Christmas pieces by a longshot (aren’t there any other Spanish-language Christmas songs we could hear instead of this one, please?) done in an O.K. fashion by Gwen Stefani (who admitted she had to learn the lyrics phonetically and take care she got the vocal and rhythmic accents right) in a duet with genuine Latina Mani Laferte (once again I think I have her name right).

Afterwards came one of the highlights of the evening: Dolly Parton and Jennifer Nettles singing a song called “Circle of Love” -- Dolly wrote the song but gave it to Nettles for a 2016 Christmas album, and here they were singing it together, with Nettles keeping up surprisingly well with the great Dolly Parton -- though Dolly’s voice remains one of the most distinct in all music and she scored on points over the very good but not quite as distinctive Nettles. Dolly Parton may look almost embalmed these days (I suspect she’s had a lot of “work” done) but her voice is as spectacular as ever; though she’s not Black I think she probably got similar vocal training from the choir director of the church she started singing in as a kid and that has a lot to do with the longevity of her voice. Then Blake Shelton came out for his solo showcase, singing Irving Berlin’s classic “White Christmas” -- the song they should have given to Michael Buble! Afterwards the singer Sia did an original song called “Snowman” which presented her in a set that made her look like a giant doll being presented as a Christmas present to the spoiled daughter of a super-rich family. The song was good but it would have benefited from a less elaborate arrangement and a sound mix that would have been kinder to Sia’s voice instead of burying her in the texture.

Then Kelly Clarkson came on with “Underneath the Tree,” an original by her and arranger Greg Kurstin from her 2013 Christmas album Wrapped in Red, a reasonable attempt to evoke the sound of the Spector Christmas album in contemporary terms that’s hardly deathless but it is fun. After that former Voice contestant Jordan Smith came out with “Oh, Mary, Did You Know” -- as in, “Oh, Mary, did you know that your baby boy would be the Savior of Humanity and would be crucified but resurrected for the salvation of all humankind?” Frankly, I thought the angel Gabriel (or was it Michael?) had told her all that in the Annunciation, but the song was one of the most heartfelt we heard all night and Smith’s rather homely appearance belied a quite good voice that projected the song with the sincerity it needed. The final piece on the program was the inevitable duet between Shelton and Stefani on the song “You Make Me Feel Like Christmas” -- an O.K. number but as a couple Stefani and Shelton strike me like “Beauty and the Beast” 2.0 (of course Shelton and Miranda Lambert were 1.0!), and I can only hope that when this preposterous relationship finally reaches its inevitable end that Stefani gets as good a breakup album out of it as Lambert did with her multi-Grammy Award winner!