Friday, February 25, 2005 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

'Here's to Las Vegas'

'I've never had a bad time here, ever,' Barry Manilow says as he launches a new show at the Hilton

Barry Manilow says his Las Vegas residency offers more production value than anything he has been able to offer on tour. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

Barry Manilow has been called a lot of things, not all of them nice. But he ventures to say that "oldies act" isn't one of them.

"Nobody's ever said that about what I do. And yet, I'm doing material that was created many years ago," the 58-year-old entertainer notes.

"I don't think I've ever been referred to as an oldies act, and frankly, they should."

Some might chalk that up to the stamina of his hits. Others might credit the showmanship that continues to sell his grandiose ballads to more than one generation of ticket-buyers.

Either bodes well for "Manilow: Music and Passion," an exclusive run at the Las Vegas Hilton that will have the pop icon's fans doing the traveling if they want to see him in the next 12 months.

In keeping with the new, not fully defined hybrid of theater and concert in Celine Dion and Elton John's Las Vegas shows, Manilow will offer "the biggest production I've ever had" for a new window into his old hits.

People who haven't kept up with either Las Vegas or Manilow might assume this is business as usual; a longtime Las Vegas performer phoning in a greatest-hits album.

Those who follow him more closely know better. "I think I would have stopped years ago if I had to do that," the singer said last week during a break in rehearsals for the show that debuted Wednesday.

And he was ready to stop touring after the tiresome travel and heavy production costs of summer's "One Night Live! One Last Time!" tour wore him down. "It was the road that had gotten to me," he says. "After 30 years of living out of suitcases, I just wanted my life back."

The tour was barely over when he got a call from comedian David Brenner, a longtime friend who became new Hilton owner Colony Capital's first entertainment commitment in the fall.

"David, I just unpacked," Manilow remembers saying. But he also recalled seeing Dion's "A New Day ..." opus at Caesars Palace, and thinking, "Wouldn't it be nice if I could continue to make music and entertain audiences but didn't have to go on the road?"

Now he figures to have both an easy puddle-jump to his home in Palm Springs, Calif., and the ability to delve back into the theatricality that's long interested him.

The new show harkens back to the "Swing Street" tour Manilow brought to the same Hilton stage in 1988. That show included scenery, rear-screen projections and costumed actors illustrating scenes from the singer's childhood and early career.

The Hilton is his favorite Las Vegas stage, "because (it) is the size of a football field. You can throw anything that you want on it. And yet the house is not enormous," he says of the 1,600-seat theater. "That's my favorite kind of house to perform to."

The set includes a sprawling bandstand and side stages to represent a piano bar and comedy club.

"I feel that the songs land more if I can bring them into my experiences or their experiences instead of saying, `Here's another one of my favorites.' I've never been able to do that," he says.

"I've always kind of jumped off a cliff and been intimate with these strangers out there. And they seem to like it. This offers me the opportunity of actually getting literal now and again."

The new show is not so singly autobiographical. Manilow describes it as more of a shout-out to Las Vegas entertainers, both the legends and the unsung heroes of the lounges.

"What I wanted to do was say `thank you' to those talents who came before me, that got Vegas where it is," he says. "These talents that I have seen in Vegas, from lounge acts to piano bar players to showgirls, and all these people (who do) eight shows a night, killing themselves while people are playing the slot machines."

The premise came to him quickly, he says, like all of his good ideas. "If I don't get the whole idea in 15 minutes, whether it's the melody for a song or an idea for a show, I know I'm gonna have problems," he says. "When this opportunity happened, I woke up one morning with the entire show written."

The structure isn't so formal that he expects all audiences to pick up on it. At least not until he gets to a new song called "Here's to Las Vegas," which he self-financed to record with a 50-piece orchestra. "It kind of snowballed into this tip of the hat to everybody that kills themselves here in the music business."

Manilow himself didn't play Las Vegas until he had made it out of the piano bars. He was three albums into a solo career -- spun from his work as musical director for Bette Midler -- when he first played Las Vegas as Helen Reddy's MGM Grand opening act in January 1976.

"I've never had a bad time here, ever. I've never had a bad show," he says. "I've always been warned that the audiences here would be cold, that they would be out-of-towners who just came to check out the names on the marquee (and) not as excited as the usual audiences.

"But I have never, even since the Helen Reddy days, never felt that. They have always been very enthusiastic, very generous, very kind."

Manilow doesn't want his new show to be so produced that it doesn't leave room to switch out songs from night to night. And he wants it to go beyond "the handful of songs people have come to see" to include more recent works from a 2001 concept album, "Here At the Mayflower," and jazz collaborations with Diane Schuur.

And he says he is always updating the arrangements, using the knack he always had to make the songs he didn't write ("I Write the Songs," "Mandy") fit the signature sound of those he did ("It's A Miracle," "This One's For You").

"They call me the king of recycling," he says. "I've figured out a way to continue to keep making these songs fresh for myself without hurting the integrity of it for the audience. That's the trick ... I just won't let it get stale."

Manilow wonders if some of the "young beautiful people" he's spotting in his audiences are responding to the lost art of songcraft.

"I'm guilty of it myself, now and again, because I know how to work those computers," he says. "I go to the computer and open up the sequence and come up with a groove and some chords and I maybe even come up with a melody.

"And then I go to the piano and try to play it. And it's not a song. It's a great groove and could be a great-sounding record, but try to play those things on your guitar... That kind of thing can't last."

But by all signs, the man at the piano for 24 weeks at the Hilton sure can.