Bette Midler: The Showgirl Must Go On
Bette Midler: Great Gams for 60+
Rating:
Okay, once again I get to suspend my sexual preference, at least for an evening, and attend the greatness that is the Divine Miss M. Bette Midler, who, at 63 is as raunchy and bawdy as ever. She seems to be in great shape, pacing the stage in Peg Bundy fashion and calling out to “Let’s hear it from the Jews, now let’s hear it from the Christians, now let’s hear it from the gays!”
Playing at the same venue as Elton John and Cher, this time we got free orchestra tickets. The show starts out really quite ingeniously.
For the time the audience is loading in you’re looking at a projected graphic advertisement of Bette’s “The Showgirl Must Go On,” with her in white hot pants sitting in the middle of the Nevada desert. Then as the show actually starts the graphic pulls away to show that it’s a billboard on the side of the long desert stretch of highway leading into Vegas. Donkeys and buzzards stare at us as the band walks over the boulder backdrop and takes place on the stage. A tornado rips through the desert tearing apart the billboard. It picks up cars and trucks on the highway and spins them around a la Wizard of Oz. The tornado tears through the desert and into Las Vegas, tearing up the strip. The tornado heads to Caesar’s Colosseum and proceeds to blow it apart as the stage gets hit by wind and smoke (the tornado is entering the theatre) and from the midst the Divine Miss M appears out of the tornado.
With her backup singers The Harlettes and her dancing show girls, the Caesar Salad Dancers, they go through a series of popular songs from the 30s through the 80s.
As Dolores DeLago the Mermaid
At one point she dons the mermaid tail as Dolores DeLago and does a spoof of American Idol (complete with AI’s holy trinity on video), gets talked into playing Vegas by Wayne Newton, ends up in the middle of an oil field performing, has a vision of Elvis who tells her “It’s Now or Never” and she breaks into the big time in Vegas as nearly forty mermaids in wheel chairs do a showstopper showgirl number in synchronized ballet reminiscent of Esther Williams.
At one point she becomes Soph, the world’s oldest showgirl, appearing on the stage in an eighty foot feather headdress, and Bette and her girls go into a showgirl routine called “Long Legs and Great Knockers.” She breaks up the dancing by telling obscene one liners, such as “My friend and I were at the park, sitting on a bench, when a man came over and exposed himself. My friend had a stroke, but unfortunately my arms were too short.” Near the end of this bit she had a candid moment with the audience by admitting that she was in her twenties when she created Soph and thought of Soph as being this old bat in her sixties…to which she hangs her head and says, “You can see where I’m going with this…”
The Caesar Salad Dancers
She performed her stock faves, “The Rose,” “In the Mood,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” and ended with a killer version of “Wind Beneath My Wings.”
There are several things which made me enjoy Bette more than Elton and Cher. First, the stage focused on her. Cher’s stage was really busy with acrobats (Bette says, “This is the only show on the strip that doesn’t contain French-Canadian circus performers.”) and ever changing set pieces, and Elton was so buried in his over-sized sets and videos screens you didn’t even notice he was on stage.
Second, she was actually pretty funny. Lastly, she can still sing like a motherfucker, whereas Elton’s high-end is gone and Cher is sounding more and more like a warbly man.
Manly yes, but I like it too.
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