Imagine my surprise as I showed up for Barry Manilow’s concert at the Verizon Wireless Arena on Saturday night to find a mind-numbing mass of humanity coming to the show in wave after wave of estrogen-driven fanaticism. The lines of ticket-holders stretched for blocks in each direction. It was positively surreal. With the exception of one bleak-face, disgruntled teenager who was being dragged through the crowd by an exuberant mother, most of the fans were women. Most of them – not to put too fine a point on it – were old enough to be my mother. One woman shuffled her way past me with a walker, pausing only to beam up at me. This was obviously the high point of her year.
My fiancée, who had no particular opinion about Barry Manilow, was a bit nonplussed by the whole, bizarre situation as we made our way through the crowed of big-haired, exuberantly coifed women and their resigned, sighing husbands to our seats.
“You don’t think this is a get-up-and-dance kind of crowd, do you?” she asked with a worried expression.
I was struck by the horrifying mental image of 11,000 shrieking fans falling to the floor, clutching broken hips and shook my head hopefully.
The crowd was so enormous, as a matter of fact, that the concert was delayed for several minutes while the Verizon staff shoe-horned everyone in. This didn’t go down well with the fans seated on the floor of the Arena, who tried to start a round of rhythmic hand-clapping to get the show started. Unfortunately, this was quite possibly the whitest collection of people in North America and the crowd didn’t have a sense of rhythm to begin with, so the plan never really got off the ground. In any case, the ladies and I didn’t have to wait very long, because it was shortly after this that Barry Manilow finally came on stage.
I could explain this in any number of ways, but the shortest is to put it this way – the crowd loved him.
Manilow received a standing ovation for at least half of the songs he performed, including several songs from his latest and presumably least familiar album, Here At the Mayflower. Every time he addressed the audience, he was greeted with rapturous screams. It was like being at a proto-geriatric Beatles concert. Apparently, when Manilow sings his song, Can’t Smile Without You in concert, he always calls a fan (yes, always a woman) up on stage to sing with him. This must be pretty well-known among Manilow fans, because as he played the first few chords to the song, literally hundreds of screaming fans stood up and started waving banners, all of which read “Pick ME, Barry” or some variant thereof. (He played it safe and sang his duet with a 14 year old girl.)
That’s pretty much the point of a Barry Manilow concert. Make all the jokes you like about him (and frankly, I’d like to make a lot of them), but he is awfully good at what he does. He sings catchy, soulful songs earnestly and competently. He has a very good attitude about himself and throughout the show made self-deprecating jokes about himself that were actually funny. (Well, not hysterical!) The fact that more than 11,000 screaming, adoring fans were there for the sole purpose of telling him how much they loved him is a good indication of how successful he is as a showman.
He dances like Pee-Wee Herman, though.
Set List:
I’m Coming Back
*Ready to Take a Chance Again
*Daybreak
*Somewhere in the Night
*This One’s For You
*Done as a medley
Looks Like We Made It
Can’t Smile Without You
American Bandstand
Mandy
Even Now
Medley of Jingles
Could This Be The Magic?
New York City Rhythm
Every Single Day
I Made It Through the Rain
Weekend in New England
Turn the Radio Up
Here At the Mayflower
Not What You See
They Dance
Copacabana
I Write the Songs
My Country ‘Tis of Thee (Encore)
Let Freedom Ring (Encore)
It’s a Miracle (Second Encore)
One Voice (Second Encore)
