Next at Kennedy Center: Cynthia Erivo and Friends: A New Year's Eve Celebration (John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, PBS, 2023)

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

On New Year’s Eve night (Sunday, December 31) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of TV music specials, one on PBS from Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and one on CBS from various locations in Nashville. The PBS one, rather awkwardly titled Next at Kennedy Center: Cynthia Erivo and Friends: A New Year’s Eve Celebration, featured singer Cynthia Erivo. Her “friends” were Ben Platt from the Broadway cast of the musical Dear Evan Hansen and Joaquina Kalukango from the Broadway cast of the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple. (The musical has since been filmed, though Erivo isn’t in the movie and neither is Kalukango. I wonder what Alice Walker, who’s still alive at 79, thinks of the stage show or the musical film; she so hated Steven Spielberg’s 1985 movie of The Color Purple she wrote a whole book about it, The Same River Twice.) Erivo began with a great song from 1968 that’s been virtually forgotten: “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know,” written by singer-organist Al Kooper for the first Blood, Sweat and Tears album, Child Is Father to the Man. (Kooper was fired from Blood, Sweat and Tears after that album, and their mega-hit was their second album, released in 1969, called simply Blood, Sweat and Tears and featuring Canadian singer David Clayton-Thomas in Kooper’s place.) That was really the high point of the evening; later she brought out Ben Platt and did a duet with him on the Nicholas Ashford/Valerie Simpson Motown classic, “You’re All I Need to Get By,” The song was originally written for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, who recorded a great duet version in 1968 that became a major hit. In this version, Erivo totally outsang Platt. Then Platt got a solo with an O.K. but rather droopy song called “Ease My Mind,” which he co-wrote with Jenn Dicilveo and Ben Abraham, and James Taylor’s “Your Smiling Face.” There have been great covers of James Taylor songs – Melanie’s astonishing “Carolina in My Mind” and Blood, Sweat and Tears’ “Fire and Rain” come to mind – but this wasn’t one of them: Platt’s blandness as a singer totally matched Taylor’s as a songwriter.

Then Erivo introduced her bass guitarist, Rickey Minor, and identified him as one of the “Friends” in the show’s title. She then did a song on which the competition is enormous: Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns” from A Little Night Music. The song as it’s generally performed out of context has a bittersweet ending, but when I actually saw a live production of A Little Night Music I was astonished that there’s a reprise of the song, with different lyrics, that would supply a far more hopeful and upbeat ending. Alas, nobody who does the song outside of the complete show does that part! Erivo was no exception, though at least she phrased what she did perform eloquently even though I couldn’t help but compare her to Sarah Vaughan, who on a February 1978 live broadcast to save San Francisco’s jazz radio station KJAZ sang the greatest version of “Send In the Clowns” I’ve ever heard. (She also sang a stunning version of the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers” on that same broadcast.) Erivo’s next song was “Let’s Stay Together,” written by Al Green, Willie Mitchell and Al Jackson in 1971. It was a hit for Green a year later and for Tina Turner in 1984 – and their two versions couldn’t be more different even though the lyrics remained the same. Green’s version is a ballad about romantic contentment sung in a smooth way that pays tribute to a happy and well-functioning relationship. Turner’s is a psychodrama in which the singer desperately pleads with her beloved to stay with her. Cynthia Erivo tried to steer a middle course between Green’s and Turner’s masterpieces and came up with something that was neither fish nor fowl, neither mellow nor wrenching. Then Erivo brought on Joaquina Kalukango and duetted with her on “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” the big hit for Roberta Flack in 1973 (though it was actually written by singer Lori Lieberman with Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel and inspired after Lieberman went to a concert by Don McLean, of all people). The extra voice really didn’t add much, but it was still a lovely song and Erivo and Kalukango did it justice.

Then Kalukango took the stage solo for a cover of a Natalie Cole hit from 1975, “This Will Be,” and an O.K. version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from the 1993 musical Sunset Boulevard. Though Don Black and Christopher Hampton wrote the lyrics, it’s such a generic Lloyd Webber power ballad I momentarily thought it was from The Phantom of the Opera. After that Erivo returned to the stage for “Let Me Go,” co-written by Mykal Gilmore with Gregory Dean Dubensky and sung by Gilmore as the opening track and first single from his album A Man Born Black. Erivo closed the show with “Nothing Compares 2 U,” originally written by the late Prince Rogers Nelson – though the world knew him only by his first name – though the hit was by Sinéad O’Connor. O’Connor’s version was chilling in its restraint; Erivo, by contrast, turned on all the soul-music devices and came up with a version far less interesting and powerful. I like Cynthia Erivo as a singer but I don’t think she always makes the best choices either of what songs to sing or how to arrange and perform them, and the show overall was a far cry from what it could have been.