Sarah Brightman - The "What the Hell?" Tour Stops in Orlando

Sarah Brightman is an enigma, a sort of riddle without a punchline or a mystery that has no outcome. To define her would be like trying to find explain Cirque du Soleil or even Cher. I have a real love/hate thing with her music and performances. Here is an incredibly talented woman who can sing opera or pop (popera) and go from one to the other effortlessly, yet she insists on larding her albums with songs using a whispy voice that requires that she push so much air to produce the undesirable sound, that her head must spin for lack of oxygen. This annoyance is quite evident in her 2 latest CDs, “Symphony’ and “A Winter Symphony”.

On the tune “Fleur du Mal” (from “Symphony”) you can hear her inhaling as if gasping (not just a polite breath) to make it to the end of some of the phrases. Yet, she is able to give a credible performance using both pop and opera on several of the other songs on the album. Take “Canto Della Terra” – she starts off the piece in that weak little cherub head voice and then soars into a trained ‘classical’ interpretation opposite Andrea Bocelli. The effect is stunning! Yet she continues to use that chirpy little bird voice on too many of her songs, especially on her “A Winter Symphony” CD. Any hint of vocal substance is missing from this cold and dreary project which includes “throwaways” for the sake of meeting production deadlines. Arrangements are bland and uninteresting.
Yet, in the past, she could take me off the floor with her high-ceilinged vocal interpretations. Her combination of light and airy with classic vocal performance is evident on such tunes as “Anytime, Anywhere”, “Il Mio Cuore Va’, “Figlio Perduto”, and of course “Time to Say Goodbye”. It is a palatable mix.

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Knowing that she would be covering songs from “my many previous albums”, I went to see her at the new UCF Arena on her latest “Symphony” tour. The show would better have been titled “What the Hell?” The evening’s proceedings began with a lengthly prerecorded music wash with accompanying light ballets and flickers as the diva set herself in place at the head of a long runway protruding from the stage into the audience.

When the lights came up, THIS is what we saw .....

My first “What the Hell?” moment. Did she have a fight with her patio screens while she was storing them up for winter? Is she afraid of being attacked by killer bees? All I could think was …. You guessed it …. “What the Hell?” Several dancing members of her entourage appeared and undraped the mess, revealing Ms Brightman dressed in a red gown. It was my wish at this point that she just sing in the very nice dress. Not to happen. She made it through several tunes from her latest effort, dancers appeared and did a few choreographed wiggles and kicks, the lights went down and Ms Brightman appeared to be ‘suspended’ in a water ballet scene as she sang “Hijo de la Luna”. Don’t call lockdown on me – our diva du jour was actually laying on the floor of the stage being photographed and projected on the screen just above the stage. It was a great effect and the audience appreciated the technology.

Her costumes were just downright goofy. In a duet with tenor Mario Frangoulis, she wore this little number from the Marie Antoinette/Ringling Brothers Collection. Frangoulis just about blew her off the stage with his amazing chops and I don’t know how he kept a straight face while singing with her. It was quite bizarre. See my review of a Frangoulis concert here ….. scroll down to "Tampa Concert Report by a Fan".

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My heartfelt apologies for the steep ticket prices.

It takes big bucks to make a woman look this cheap."

And then there was this item from the What the Hell? Collection. Oy!

"Hello. My name is Sarah Brightman.

Is this the casting call for the Fellini movie?"

About that time, I wanted to yell “Just put on a nice dress and just sing, for crying out loud!”

So she did.

……. And Frangoulis joined her again for The Phantom of the Opera, the high point in the show. But alas, weird became the new black. A guy in a rabbit head, the Mad Hatter and Alice in Wonderland popped out from a trap door in the floor and chased each other about and before we knew it, there was Ms Brightman, suspended on a stationary bicycle as a somewhat demented Little Red Riding Hood (keep in mind – this babe is 48 years old) peddling away, doing a rap number with Tchkovsky’s “Nutcracker” being chased by holographic wolves projected on a scrim. I’m not making this up. At first, I thought the beer that I had at intermission had distorted my brain's eye, but my wife, who was not partaking of the $6.00 beverage selection, backed me up on what I saw. SB is proud to announce that all of the ideas for her shows come out of her imagination. I Googled it --- she has had no recent head wounds.

But, I am still quite the Sarah Brightman fan, for which I should probably see a shrink. Her purists will say “Oh, but that’s just our Sarah. She is so MANY different things.” Baloney! She’s quite the nutjob and she is one talented gal. If she does half the show without an overdose of the creepies, it’s still worth the ticket.

See you on the "It's All About Me" tour, Sarah.