She's Not Coming Down Anytime Soon

And the end of the year diva season got started last night with Idina Menzel's concert at the House of Blues. I kind of already knew this from seeing her in Wicked, but she's one of those people like Linda Eder that sound exactly the same live as they do on CD, which is always nice (seriously, remember how Ricky Martin's career effectively peaked once he performed on SNL in 1999 and sounded awful compared to his CD. Sales were never the same). This was only my fourth time at HOB (amazing how after years of going to concerts all over Chicago, I suddenly doubled the number of times I've been there in the last 6 months), and I'm really pretty determined never to go there again unless it's someone really good. The other three times I've been there, it's always been general admission, with the floor wide open for standing room. So, this time I headed in (actually getting through the TSA security pretty quickly, they guessed it right this time), excited to head as close to the stage as possible, and found the floor completely sealed off and filled with folding chairs. General Admission was limited to standing around the bars on either side of the theater, smashed in with a few hundred other people. There was nothing on Ticketmaster's site when I bought the ticket indicating that this was going to be the setup. They simply had GA tickets and reserved seat tickets which I thought were the balcony seats and bar stools that are usually set up around the perimeter of the floor. Plus, this was also my first time being in there during the summer, and even though the weather was decent outside, it was so hot inside. So, I headed to the bar right at the top of the stairs so that I could make a quick exit once it was done, got a drink and some pizza, and quickly got crowded in on all sides. I got there about 6:50 and the opening act was already playing, which is a good idea. However, he was exactly the type of opening act I would expect based on her solo CD. It was some slightly overweight guy with a guitar doing Five For Fighting-style songs, a complete snoozefest and not exactly who I'd want warming up my crowd if I was a professional entertainer. It wasn't bad, it was just very bland. As more people started coming in, I wondered if I had gotten the venue wrong and instead of being at Idina Menzel's concert, I had somehow wandered into a Future Social Workers of America convention. Again, I realize it's a consequence of the type of solo music she prefers to do, and thank god it's not as egregious as Heather Headley's solo crap, but at the same time, she's got kind of a career schizophrenia going on. There was a decent showtune queen contingent, but the vast majority of the audience was overweight mid-30's Jewish women who looked like they were on a study break from the LCSW exam. In another 10 years they'll all be carrying around gigantic knit bags filled with bottles of saline solution and single serving emergency cat food packs. So, I knew the showtunes were going to be minimal, but based on her interview in playbill.com's Diva Talk column a couple months ago, I was expecting more than 3 (actually 2 1/2, she only did half of For Good, but more on that in a few). She came out around 7:50 and opened with a very tight series of songs from I Stand, beginning with the title track and working through about 4 or 5 more. As I said, she sounded just as good live, and she did the best songs, so it wasn't quite as crunchy as it could have been, plus she kept her plastic accessorizing down to a bare minimum, just one bracelet, no neckwear, so it wasn't quite as folks-y a vibe as the CD itself is. She kept the between song-banter to a minimum, and really picked up a lot of steam. Then the first cracks started appearing, coinciding with her starting to drink out of the cup by her feet that her assistant had set on the stage just before the show. I would love to know what was in it, because as the show kept going on and she kept drinking from it, she seemed to get looser and more distracted, almost like a Jewish Amy Winehouse. So after about 5 or 6 songs from I Stand, she did Here, the title track from her first EP, and spent almost 5 minutes teaching the audience how to accurately do the "huh" part of the introduction, like it was the most fun thing ever. Once she got into the song, it was good, and she then followed it up with My Own Worst Enemy, which proved to be so prophetic. That song was the effective end of the concert, the rest was her talking about random topics and working in about 4 more songs over the next 45 minutes. She started with a long story about dropping out of Hebrew school and she never got to do her Bat Mitzvah, and she regrets not getting to sing one particular passage of the Bible (or the Torah or whatever it is they make their selections from), so she sang some Jewish verse about Deborah and her role in leading Israel's army, but she kept interrupting it with tangential stories that didn't quite fit with the theme of the passage, and she kept repeating it over and over and lost all the energy she had built up prior to that point. She then did a very lengthy variety show-type sketch about her early career when she was 15 as a wedding/bar/bat mitzvah singer on Long Island. It could have been really funny, but she kept rambling on all these tangents and it was about 5 minutes too long. She did some great self-aware re-enactments of the 80's songs she had had to perform and the crazy choreography that went with them, and it could have been a tight sketch piece like Bette Midler does in her shows, but it just lacked focus. However, she did a phenomenal performance of Embraceable You, which was probably the highlight of the show towards the end of the skit to illustrate how she had tried to work in serious music, but then she really went off track after that. It turned out the point was to show how she ended up in Rent (she didn't get along with the headliner and quit when he threw a microphone at her), but it took so long to get there through so many detours that it didn't quite seem worth it. Seriously, Betty Buckley, who is a master at telling stories on the stage that keep the show moving along, should give a master class on how to do stage banter, and Idina and Heather should both be required to go before anyone will book them anywhere ever again. At this point the show was effectively over. She talked for about another 10 minutes about the Rent experience (which of course I could have done without) and then finally did her first showtune, "No Day But Today," and it wasn't bad (and definitely a better choice than Seasons of Love), but then she really lost focus. She did some song about someone named Roxanne turning on a red light, and jumped around all over the stage to the point where she was winded and needed about 5 minutes to catch her breath. She then skipped over The Wild Party and Wicked on Broadway altogether and jumped to going to London for Wicked but then used that to segue into having a great writing session with some famous songwriter in London the day after she finished her run and then did Wasted. She then went right into an a capella version of For Good, but only did the first verse and chorus, and then said goodnight, but stayed on stage for one more song and then left. There was no I'm Not That Girl, nothing from See What I Wanna See, and no Damsel in Distress (from the Desperate Housewives soundtrack). She quickly came back for an encore and did a song from the upcoming Duncan Sheik musical Nero (ok, so make that 3 1/2 showtunes, this one is just hard to count since it's not actually a show yet for the song to be a tune from). It was really good, and then she got into Defying Gravity, which unfortunately, being the last song of the night, was one of the biggest disappointments. After listening to her ramble for the last 45 minutes, I wanted belting. I wanted the full Broadway orchestra, the screaming and wailing, and I even wouldn't have minded some flying. Instead, she did it almost as a lullaby, completely out of tune from the show's arrangement, and mostly just repeating "I think I'll try defying gravity" over and over, and then getting the audience to sing along (which actually is great that there's enough people out there to actually do a sing along to a showtune), and then completely skipped the bridge and final verse, and just kept doing "I think I'll try defying gravity" for another several minutes, and then finally did the end note and hold, and that was it. The woman is obviously talented, but like Heather Headley, she needs to make a choice. Does she want to do showtunes or does she want to do some other style of music? It doesn't have to be completely mutually exclusive, Betty Buckley does a great fusion of jazz (which I would hate from anyone else) and showtunes, and Linda Eder does pop music, standards, and showtunes, but they both have their own personal style that allows them to do those different styles but to make the choices seem totally natural, giving continuity to their performances. Heather and Idina can't seem to reconcile their preferred musical styles, which makes them rather schizophrenic performers. Plus, whatever she had in that cup was not helping at all. So, for $35 it was worth seeing, but next time she might be better off at Ravinia (if she can cut the banter and focus on the music, she'd be a great choice for next year's Martinis at the Martin series), and sticking to more showtunes.