Somewhere early in the concert, Barry Manilow mused to the crowd that he never dreamed of being a singer — just being a songwriter was good enough for him. And he explained that he got his big break when a record label surprised him by asking him to perform songs he had sent them for others.
Both jobs sell him short.
For approximately 90 minutes Friday night at the Prudential Center, Manilow showed he is the ultimate showman.
Singing. Dancing. Interacting with the crowd in an intimate manner that perhaps is lost on many current acts. Manilow delivered a top-shelf show.
Which brings us to a key point in all of this: Barry Manilow, cancer survivor, is 83.
He just didn’t act like it.
And the crowd, many of whom were teenagers or young adults when Manilow became a global icon in the 1970s, loved every minute of it.
There was hardly an empty seat to be found.
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Music education
As he always does, Barry Manilow recognized a local music teacher, Mario Banks of Science Park High, during the show – and announced he is donating $10,000 to the music program there to help support the next generation of musicians.
The Prudential Center often describes itself as the front door for entertainment in the state — a place where acts from a variety of genres bring a wider audience to the region. You can’t be a regular customer until you come there once.
But don’t be mistaken. This wasn’t a booking used to bring an older demographic to the place. It was hardly a blast-from-the-past effort before a few thousand people you might find at a second-tier resort in mid-America. And it was far from a case where a performer from another era needs a group of backup singers and a powerful band to cover up the fact they can’t hit the notes they once did.
This was an A-level act.
Manilow certainly worked to involve everyone on stage, but he was clearly running the show. Standing and dancing (perhaps shuffling) for almost all of it — only moving to his piano on a few occasions.
And, like a modern star, he incorporated a handful of wardrobe changes into the night, with each new jacket seemingly having a few more sequins than the previous.
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We write all this while noting another key point: This show almost didn’t happen.
Originally scheduled for April, it was delayed due to his slow recovery from lung cancer surgery. Many wondered if it would ever be rescheduled.
And while many in the crowd were wearing “last show” T-shirts from Manilow concerts of yesteryear (one was dated for a concert in 2015), with each passing year, you have to ask: Is this the last show?
Was this the last chance for a generation that grew up listening to him on an 8-track player in a car that didn’t have seatbelts to sing along to ‘Mandy,’ ‘I Write the Songs’ and, of course, ‘Copacabana’?
Manilow hinted as much to a crowd that didn’t want to hear it.
The point, however, became a bit more real when he offered an emotional tribute to Clive Davis, the legendary music producer who discovered and mentored Manilow in his early years — and who passed away just four days prior to the show.
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How old is Barry Manilow?
Well, he’s not 100, as he joked about being throughout the show. But he is old enough that he could have been a headline act during the Bicentennial in 1976 — and he would have been 33 at the time, hardly a kid.
And while a few others from that era are still performing — he’s a year or two younger than Paul McCartney and Barbra Streisand, a year or two older than Rod Stewart and Diana Ross — few would be able to do what he did last Friday night.
It wasn’t just hitting the notes; Manilow was connecting with the crowd: Telling stories of his upbringing in Brooklyn (sharing a tale of how his grandfather was the first to truly discover his talents), talking about being a piano player for hire as a kid (just so he could be involved in music), showing old clips of him on TV (who remembers ‘Midnight Special’) and being self-deprecating about his spot as a cultural sex symbol (‘I looked like Taylor Swift on a bad hair day,’ he said).
The best part of the show?
It was over at 9:30. A perfect ending note for this crowd.
