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July 7, 1999
Cher: Quirky but Real, the Beat Goes On
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By ANN POWERS
EW YORK -- The world might as well defer to Cher's miraculous powers, because, as she sang in one of her hits at Jones Beach on Monday night, she really can turn back time. Cher can find her way back into relevance again and again, and it's not exactly because she changes with the trends. Instead she waits, like the sentinel of an enchanted world, and judges when it's safe to open up a trade route. Her judgment has not always proven correct, but right now it is impeccable.
Aaron Lee Fineman for The New York TimesHigh-energy with a rough-and-tumble edge: Cher performing at Jones Beach.
The title track of Cher's current album, "Believe" (Warner Brothers), is one of those unavoidable singles that seem to characterize something about their moment. But at Jones Beach, the song exemplified Cher's transcendence of such temporal boundaries.
Two acrobats swung from trapezes as Cher and her dancers, clad in silver and white, turned the number into a high-energy circus. Cher's costume may have been futuristic, but it also echoed the one she wore earlier in the evening during her performance of "Take Me Home," her late 1970s ode to disco-driven one-night stands.
Cher was connecting the dots for her audience, showing that when you're a star of her magnitude, fashion will always return to you, hanging its head. As if to throw off accusations of her recent capitulations to time and taste, she began the evening in her most bizarre outfit, a giant red wig and vaguely primitive trapper wear, which she called "Braveheart, Mel Gibson with breasts." Belting out a splashy version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for," she established herself as a mythical heroine, questing but always true to herself.
Her casual banter played up that integrity, not a word one might normally associate with a woman who has tried every corner of show biz, from Oscar-winning Hollywood to Atlantic City to pop metal and infomercials. But Cher manages to project candor and warmth within the vortex of glamour. She isn't afraid to tell her audience when her wig feels weird.
She made fun of her "new, cool album" several times and swore that she would always dress outrageously, even when age confined her to a wheelchair. "But I have lots of time before that happens," she quickly added. Indeed, this 53-year-old singer emanated youthfulness, not only in her notoriously well-preserved looks but in her vocals.
Cher has taken flak over the years for her husky tone and limited dynamic range, but as she moved through a medley of early hits like "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves," through '80s ballads like "After All," and into her current neo-disco material, that voice asserted its outstanding qualities. It is a quintessential rock voice: impure, quirky, a fine vehicle for projecting personality. Even the computer manipulations it endures in "Believe" can't make it sound like anyone else's.
The codification of personality is the essence of modern-day celebrity, as stars increasingly define the life styles average people emulate. The effect of stars' sharing their tastes in home furnishings (Cher has her own line of home accessories), diet, hair products, even boyfriends, is paradoxical: it makes stars seem like intimate players in our daily lives, but it also threatens their singularity, making them into model consumers instead of uncommon creatures.
Cher avoids this dilemma by being a traditional entertainer as well as a modern personality. Even at her most spectacularly styled, she keeps a rough-and-tumble, vaudevillian edge. It is in her music, in the film performances briefly shown on screen during her concert and in her persona. By maintaining an old-fashioned ethic of showmanship, she seems exceptionally real. That is why the fans who attended these Jones Beach shows, and the ones who see her at Madison Square Garden next week, stick with her.
Cyndi Lauper, who played a brief opening set Monday, would like to make the same transition Cher has; she even performed "Disco Inferno" in a big red cowboy hat to entice those who like "Believe."
But despite a voice that remains strong and distinctive, and her newer songs that showed potential, Ms. Lauper has not figured out how to go beyond the moment that made her a star. She still had to drag out "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" to close her set, and its emotional high point was the ballad "Time After Time," also from her 1984 solo debut.
Wild Orchid, a pop trio that opened Monday's show, hit no high points, emotional or otherwise.
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