Are you a Fanilow?

Yesterday around 4:30 I was getting ready to go out for some poker, when an email hit my inbox from http://www.houseseats.com/, announcing "last-minute" free ticket availability for Barry Manilow at the Hilton, 8:00 pm.

OK, time for a confession. I'm a straight male who likes Barry Manilow. Not crazy Fanilow level or anything, but I'm a sucker for a good love song or schmaltzy sad one, and Barry fills the bill.

So I speed-dialed my best friend, and, bless her heart, she was willing to sit through it with me, even though her musical taste runs more to the Beastie Boys, The Cure, and Linkin Park. So I nabbed the tickets and off we went.

The seats weren't quite as primo as the ones for Blue Man Group the previous night, but they were perfectly fine: about four rows from the back of the main floor, toward the far right, in what had once been Elvis Presley's theater. Paying full price would have been $137.50 apiece. (That's the second-cheapest price level. They run from $104.50 to $247.50.)

I can't add this to my list of best-ever Vegas shows, but it was certainly good enough that I'm glad I went. My complaints: (1) They started about 10 minutes late. (2) It was fairly short, about 1 1/4 hours. (3) They passed out chemical glow sticks, which just encouraged people to do that stupid slow arm-waving thing. (4) Some idiots in the audience always felt compelled to sing along, apparently on the assumption that everybody had come to hear them sing, rather than Barry Manilow. (5) It was much too amplified. (It's been said that if you think the music is too loud, you're too old. You can imagine, then, what it says about you if you find Barry Manilow too loud.) (6) I had a hard time seeing over the head of the guy in front of me--had to keep bobbing and weaving. (7) Even though the show is ostensibly meant to focus on Manilow's hits (the previous iteration of his Hilton show, "Music and Passion," featured on the poker chip shown above, is no more; this one is called "Ultimate Manilow: The Hits"), he did ultra-shortened and medley versions of many of my favorites in order to cram them in and get them out of the way to make room for pimping his soon-to-be-released album of other people's 1980s hits, as well as his other "decades" collections.

Perhaps most peculiar is that my friend and I both independently concluded that he was lip-syncing at least part of the time. There were spots in which he seemed out of phase with what we were hearing. Once I caught him whispering something to a fan in the first row while his singing voice finished the last second or two of a phrase over the speakers. This was all pretty mystifying, because for most of the show it was perfectly obvious that he was not lip-syncing. For example, he hit an off note once, garbled the lyrics of "American Bandstand" in one place, I heard his voice crack once, and at one point he paused a song to respond to something shouted from the audience--not things you would pre-record. His speaking voice sounded unusually raspy, so perhaps he has a cold or is developing a vocal cord problem, can't sustain an entire show, and thus has some voice rests built in, in the form of recorded music. I don't know. It was kind of weird.

In spite of the above nit-picking, I had a good time. It tugged at every sappy, soft-hearted, nostalgic bone in my body to hear "Weekend in New England," "Somewhere in the Night," "Trying to Get the Feeling Again," "Mandy" (done in an interesting manner: with Barry singing and playing the piano in parallel with the projected videotape of a 1975 television performance of the same song), "Looks Like We Made It," and my all-time choke-me-up favorite, "Even Now." Manilow is the king of wistfulness. If those last three songs can't reach something deep inside you that still pines for a lost love and wonders what might have been, well, you're lacking one of the emotions that make us human. Carrying an old torch is simultaneously happy and painful, and nobody can stoke those flames more effectively than Barry.

Two good shows in two days--excellent value from my houseseats.com subscription, I'd say. But enough of it for now. I need to get back to earning and to the main subject of this blog, which will soon return to being about poker.